Books

A book of reflection on the difference between faith and religion. Ingemar writes about people harmed by harsh religions, about piousness and vague spirituality, and about a picture of Jesus that he believes believers and secular readers alike have misunderstood.

The text moves across the world and through different eras and cultures, with Sweden, which the book calls the world’s most secularised country, in view. It takes further the questions he ran into himself in Utvisningen. Behind it lies his university degree in theology, with the psychology of religion as his main subject, and a final thesis on Bob Dylan’s religious conversion and what it meant for his songwriting.

Two Iranian women have lived in Sweden for four years when they are detained for deportation back to Iran. The musician, standing in as a pastor at the time, does everything he can to stop it, and finds himself inside a story that outpaces most thrillers.

The difference is that all of it happened. The women have to fight the authorities of two countries, honor-based violence and political and religious oppression, with no guarantee of a happy ending.

The memoir of the years around 1965 to 1975, when a young man had one foot in the pop band The Sounds at the Nalen club and the other in the Baptist chapel Tabernaklet in Hässelby. Red jeans, clogs and long hair, guitar on his back and a Bible in his back pocket.

Ingemar writes openly about the first years of his career and what went on behind the scenes: the friends, the girls, the dreams and the disappointments. About meeting John Lennon, Cliff Richard, Janne Schaffer and Per-Erik Hallin, and how all of it colored the music and the lyrics.