Ok, I have to admit that I was never a Bruce Springsteen fan. As a lifelong Jersey resident that might be heresy. If so, I am now born again (or is that 'born to run'). Devils & Dust is a great record. The songs are deep and emotional, the arrangements have space to come alive and convey the strength of the songs without being either overly arranged, or being so stark as to be distracting. Add to this that the CD is a Dual Disc (One side DVD and one side CD - giving you DVD Audio  as well as standard recordings, plus a video of Bruce singing many of the recordings in a documentary style ... makes this worth a purchase).
The closest that I've gotten to being a fan was the Nebraska album, and I still like that one - but this one is top notch. If Springsteen was one of the 'New Bob Dylans' as Louden Wainwright put it, it just have taken him this long in his career to achieve peer status, in my book at least. Perhaps the phenomenal successes of his career have left him free to pursue music he wants to make regardless of the commercial viability of it - what is special here is that he's done that while many other artists with similar freedoms haven't.
info on Devils & Dust can be found at http://www.brucespringsteen.net/news/index.html