Books by Dale Harris

Books by Dale Harris
A Feast of Epiphanies

Though I Walk, A Novel

Daytime Moons and Other Celestial Anomalies, a book of poems

Second Wind

Second Wind
An album of songs both old and new. Recorded in 2021, a year of major transition for me, these songs explore the many vicissitudes of the spiritual life,. It's about the mountaintop moments and the Holy Saturday sunrises, the doors He opens that no one can close, and those doors He's closed that will never open again. You can click the image above to give it a listen.

The Song Became a Child

The Song Became a Child
A collection of Christmas songs I wrote and recorded during the early days of the pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. Click the image to listen.

There's a Trick of the Light I'm Learning to Do

This is a collection of songs I wrote and recorded in January - March, 2020 while on sabbatical from ministry. They each deal with a different aspect or expression of the Gospel. Click on the image above to listen.

Three Hands Clapping

This is my latest recording project (released May 27, 2019). It is a double album of 22 songs, which very roughly track the story of my life... a sort of musical autobiography, so to speak. Click the album image to listen.

Ghost Notes

Ghost Notes
A collections of original songs I wrote in 2015, and recorded with the FreeWay Musical Collective. Click the album image to listen.

inversions

Recorded in 2014, these songs are sort of a chronicle of my journey through a pastoral burn-out last winter. They deal with themes of mental-health, spiritual burn-out and depression, but also with the inexorable presence of God in the midst of darkness. Click the album art to download.

soundings

soundings
click image to download
"soundings" is a collection of songs I recorded in September/October of 2013. Dealing with themes of hope, ache, trust and spiritual loss, the songs on this album express various facets of my journey with God.

bridges

bridges
Click to download.
"Bridges" is a collection of original songs I wrote in the summer of 2011, during a soul-searching trip I took out to Alberta; a sort of long twilight in the dark night of the soul. I share it here in hopes these musical reflections on my own spiritual journey might be an encouragement to others: the sun does rise, blood-red but beautiful.

echoes

echoes
Prayers, poems and songs (2005-2009). Click to download
"echoes" is a collection of songs I wrote during my time studying at Briercrest Seminary (2004-2009). It's called "echoes" partly because these songs are "echoes" of times spent with God from my songwriting past, but also because there are musical "echoes" of hymns, songs or poems sprinkled throughout the album. Listen closely and you'll hear them.

Accidentals

This collection of mostly blues/rock/folk inspired songs was recorded in the spring and summer of 2015. I call it "accidentals" because all of the songs on this project were tunes I have had kicking around in my notebooks for many years but had never found a "home" for on previous albums. You can click the image to download the whole album.

Random Reads

Meeting Mr. Wright

In the spring of 2006, I took a course on the Gospels that deeply impacted my heart and mind for ministry. It was in this class that I was first introduced to the work of N. T. Wright, slugging my way through Jesus and the Victory of God with wonder and determination. As I discovered new lenses there for understanding the life and mission and Kingdom-proclamation of Jesus, I've never read the Gospels, or the rest of the Bible for that matter, the same way since.

Still studying for my OCE, I came across this review of one section of Jesus and the Victory of God that I wrote for that class:

Wright examines what a Messianic identity would have meant for Jesus and his contemporaries given his historical context, stressing that the title “Messiah” did not connote a “divine or quasi-divine figure” in first-century Judaism. Historically the Messianic mantle was a relatively elastic one that could be tailored to fit the figure of the claimant who donned it. Wright points to three themes common among the disparate Messianic movements of Jesus’ day: Israel’s return from exile, the centrality of the Temple, and the victorious battle against Israel’s enemies. Jesus’ self-understanding as the Messiah is evident, then, in the ways the praxis, stories and symbols of his mission both relate to and radically redefine these themes. In regarding himself as Messiah, Jesus saw himself as the one who “summed up Israel’s vocation and destiny,” the one “in and through whom the real return from exile would come about.” Wright understands the Temple action, for example, as Jesus’ symbolic enactment of his Messianic role as the Temple’s reformer and rebuilder. Similarly, he reads the discourses following the Temple action as “messianic riddles” that function cryptically as Jesus’ explanation of this action and implicitly as a Messianic claim. Wright’s uses this portrait of Jesus’ Messianic identity to explain the details of Jesus’ trial: the importance of the temple accusations, Caiaphas’s question about Jesus’ Messiahship, and especially Jesus’ reference to the Son of Man as a prediction of his own vindication.
Some questions we might ask about Wright’s portrait of the historical Jesus include:
1. Wright’s explanations of the so-called “messianic riddles” are often built around polyvalent readings of allusions to a variety of different texts. At what point do such intricate explanations stretch interpretation beyond plausibility by depending on layers of literary meaning that may or may not have been immediately accessible in the oral context in which these “riddles” were uttered?
2. How can Wright’s portrait of Jesus’ “non-transcendent” Messianic identity be historically continuous with the more “incarnational” Christology that seems to have developed relatively quickly in the early Church (such as we see in Colossians, Hebrews and the Gospel of John)?

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