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

Covenant, Creation and Ecology in Hosea

And while I’m thinking about creation, brotherhood and covenant, there’s a text in the book of Hosea that has been on my mind for a long time that I’d like to share.

In Hosea 4:1-3, we read these heart–breaking lines: “There is no faithfulness or kindness or knowledge of God in the land ... therefore the land mourns and everyone who lives in it languishes, along with the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, and also the fish of the sea.” With words that wouldn’t stand out too starkly at the next UNEP summit, Hosea describes the land itself withering as a direct result of human faithlessness.

This would be ominous enough to give us pause, but later in the book, Hosea details the sins of the people by saying: “Like Adam they have transgressed the covenant; there they have dealt treacherously with me” (6:7).

Like it did in Amos 1:9, the question of covenant arises again, this time in a way that connects environmental degradation with human sin. Among the other consequences of our covenant infidelity, we find, curiously, that the land itself is languishing. And more curious still, in violating the covenant like this, we are, Hosea declares, “like Adam.”

My Zondervan Study Bible is stumped. “The allusion is uncertain,” it explains, “since Scripture records no covenant with Adam.” This particular reference to a covenant with Adam, I suppose, doesn’t count as record of a covenant with Adam... but even if Hosea 6 here didn’t count, the creation story in Genesis is so packed with covenant imagery that, short of a post-it label on every verse saying “I’m making a covenant here!” God makes it pretty clear that when he created everything in the beginning, he was also covenanting to uphold it all by his life-giving spirit (see also Psalm 104:24-30). It’s not for nothing that in Genesis 9:9, when God “establishes” his covenant with Noah, he uses a word (qûm) which suggests a pre-existing covenant that God is simply now extending to Noah (i.e. if God had meant, “I’m creating a new covenant with you, Noah,” he would have used the verb kârat or natan). The Noahic covenant (that God will keep the creation going, summer and winter, springtime and harvest) is actually an extension of the covenant with all creation that God made in the beginning.

And with this in mind, the weight of Hosea 4-6 comes crashing down with ominous force: the Adamic covenant has to do with God’s commitment to sustain his creation, and it gave Adam a special responsibility to guard the creation (shamar) and tend it (‘abad), as the “image of God” in creation. No wonder, then, that our breaking of the Adamic covenant brings desolation on the land. It did in Genesis 3, it does in Leviticus 26, and it will in Micah 7:3. This is a theme woven like a green thread throughout the Old Testament: when the people reject the covenant, the land withers.

But I’m mulling it over today because I believe very strongly that the Christian faith has meaningful and relevant answers to the current global environmental crisis, and because I seldom hear Christians talking about it in meaningful ways, and because I think that, even more than the traditional “stewardship” paradigm (which tends toward deism and moralism), a Good-News answer to environmental issues will start with a robust understanding of God’s covenant commitment to his creation and the invitation into renewed covenant with him that he extends to us in Jesus Christ.

3 comments:

David Schuchardt said...

I'm currently reading "The Liberating Image" by J. Richard Middleton. If you haven't read it, you should - it's right up this alley!

Dale Harris said...

hey david. yeah, i've read the liberating image... pretty awesome isn't it? middleton's ideas have inspired a whole bunch of ideas on this blog (not least of all this one :)

Dale Harris said...

hey david. yeah, i've read the liberating image... pretty awesome isn't it? middleton's ideas have inspired a whole bunch of ideas on this blog (not least of all this one :)