Roots of Wisdom

This set, with its powerful melodies, brilliant playing (note the superb horns) and all round attitude, is a sparkling reminder of how reggae sounded when it first influenced the world music scene in the Seventies. But it afso bears testimony to the sophisticated consciousness, wisdom and Afrocentric worldview that were the trademarks of the Rasta rebel soul at that time. This music had weight. That 'Roots' and 'Culture' became pilloried cliches at the beginning of the 80s says something about the rot that had set in at the heart of reggae - and just as much about, how times had changed. The idea of Roots - kind of personified by Alex Haley's mid-Seventies book and TV series of the same period - typified the search for an African identity, after centuries of physical and then economic slavery, amongst Jamaican youth.

Learn the path to enlightenment and inner peace encoded by the Cathar in the Major Arcana of the Marseille Tarot

From one of the country's most respected religion reporters, a paradigm-shifting discussion of how the Religious Left is actually the moral compass that has long steered America's political debates, including today.