I am responsible for Sydney Carter's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Biography and I interviewed him. I read a fair amount of his writings from the 1960s onwards and I still read him. Sydney was no stranger to people misunderstanding his words or twisting what he said. Even if he had a grave he wouldn't be spinning in it: he would be relishing the polemics of the debate, the absurdities, the misrepresentations, the fact that his song is keeping people thinking and guessing. He'd been through it with religious factions and "Friday Morning".

Sydney was brought up as a Christian ("I could not believe half the things I was supposed to") but that was only the starting point of what was beautifully summarised as his "questing theology" in his Guardian obituary. What nobody here seems to have picked up upon is that the song's underlying image also refers to Hinduism. The Lord of the Dance is Lord Shiva, the Cosmic Dancer. He did this knowingly. He had a figure of Lord Shiva at home. He worked with images. And "Lord of the Dance" is a series of images.

As he writes in Green Print for Song (1974, 86) in his commentary on the song that is kicking up the sawdust so, "Scriptures and creeds may come to seem incredible, but faith will still go dancing on." (Carter, Green Print, 86).

I can't speak for Sydney's social conditioning as a child. Growing up in London he would certainly have come across the casual racism of the day. As an adult, he soaked up faith, religion and philosophy. He kept looking. He was no racist. Quite the opposite. Ken Hunt

PS Dave Polshaw's clarification of 4 July 2008 about anti-semitic and anti-Jewish is spot on. The two terms are most definitely not synonymous. Just because the words are misused in day-to-day speech does not make them the same. Unaware and oblivious are not synonymous either. Oh, and what's this Jewish language people are talking about?