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

A Stroll Down Amnesia Lane

One week from now I'll have my Oral Comprehensive Exam (a.k.a. OCE, a.k.a. Exit Interview) at Briercrest. As the name implies, the OCE is an oral exam where I have the chance to give a comprehensive "synthesis of the materials I have studied, and demonstrate my ability to integrate this into my on going ministry." This is the last step of a hundred mile journey for me.

To prepare for this exam, I've been reviewing old assignments, papers and projects that I've done over the last five years. There's some stuff I cringe to read, some stuff I'm surprised to read, and some stuff, try as I might, I have a hard time convincing myself I ever wrote. In the interest of having some company on this little stroll down amnesia lane (to quote Dead Poets Society), over the next few days, I'll be posting short excerpts and quotes that stand out to me as significant from this five-year scrapbook of reading and writing about ministry.

The first comes from a paper I wrote early in my program, in which I examined the role of the arts in the community of faith. It was a really significant study for my own heart and sense of calling as a Christian artist:

A common feeling among many evangelical artists [is that] to be acceptable within their faith tradition, their artistic calling will have to be rejected, subdued, or at best reduced to a kind of stale utilitarianism. However, to attribute these feelings to a lack of a “good theology of art making” [in the church] is to ignore or deny the significant work done by artists and theologians to develop just that. The estrangement experienced by Christians seeking also to be artists is perhaps more related to a general misunderstanding of the artistic vocation itself than it is to a lack of a useful theological aesthetic. … A way forward might be found in a practical re-visioning of the role and function of the artist, one that clearly embeds him within the Christian community and informs both his artistic endeavors and the community’s response to it.

This means addressing the fact that the modern conception of “the arts”—that they exist primarily as modes of self-expression for the artist, or that they exist for the sake of their own, self-referential aesthetic contemplation—is neither biblical nor theologically grounded. Instead, a theological conception of art must be primarily ecclesiocentric, understanding it as deriving its aesthetic meaning in direct relation to the communal experience of fellowship, worship and sacrament, legitimating the artist’s vocation in the context of the community of God's people. This is to recognize that the idea of the artist as distinct from artisan—our modern stereotype of the artist as an isolated voice in culture who uses his medium philosophically to "say something"—is really a conception of art spawned in the Renaissance, nursed through the Counter-Reformation and come of age with Romanticism, but often estranged from an historically Christian or biblical view of the arts. On such a foundation we have erected an institutional edifice some centuries old, in which art is dissociated from the practical life of people in community, cloistered instead in the shrines of galleries where it is exhibited for the sake of its own contemplation, expected primarily to evoke a subjective visceral or conceptual response, and vaguely disdained if it too closely resembles craft, or ornament, or folk-art. The effort to articulate an ecclesiocentric aesthetic is in fact an effort to return to a more integrated model whereby the arts become less the means of esoteric expression for the individual, and find their meaning instead in the symbolism, craft, ornament and even folk-traditions whereby the community expresses its experience of fellowship and worship.
Well, it sounded good at the time.

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