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

Three Minute Theology 3.3: From Head to Toe




There’s this Arts and Culture program on Canadian public radio  called Q, that I used to be a big fan of.  It was all about music and film and other cultural trends, and it usually featured fascinating interviews with fascinating celebrities.

In the fall of 2015, this program went through a dramatic upheaval, however. The host, a pretty well-known name in Canadian media and much loved by fans, was involved in a salacious scandal involving some pretty unsavory allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment.

Even though these were simply allegations, the host was seen as the public face of Q, and the damage had been done.  Fans were disillusioned.  Fans felt betrayed.  Fans dropped off.  Many even felt a sort of guilt-by-association: I think I did, at the time.

The producers of the show tried to recover from the scandal; they made public apologies; they brought in guest hosts on a rotating basis.  But everything they did seemed touched with the taint of the whole sordid affair.

The only way to escape it, it seemed, was to completely rebrand.  They relaunched the program with a new logo, new theme music and especially a brand new host.  The program kept its name—Q—but everything else was rebranded under the head of a new host.

Q is a successful program again—though I’m no longer a fan—but the story of Q helps us get at one of the major ideas in the story of the Cross, and the reason why the death and resurrection of Jesus brings salvation to human beings.

The idea here is a theological concept called recapitulation.  It’s a Latin word that means something like “summed up under a new head,” and the idea is that in Jesus Christ, and especially through his death and resurrection, God “recapitulated” our humanity, summing it up under a new head.

The idea goes something like this: originally, God created human beings to live in holy relationship with him, and in loving relationship with the rest of creation.  But because of human sin, people did not, and have not, lived up to that original intention.

Adam and Eve, in other words, sinned.  Scandalously.  And no matter how hard we try, we can’t escape the taint of that scandal.  We are guilty by association.

So God came to us in the person of Jesus Christ, as the Second Adam, or the New Adam, is how the New Testament writers put it, to sum up our humanity under a brand new head.

Through the Cross, God puts-to-death our old human nature, and its guilt-by-association with Adam; he crucifies it in himself, and then through the resurrection he offers us a brand new way of being human.  The resurrected Jesus puts his Spirit in us so that we can fulfill God’s original intention for humanity: a right relationship with him and a loving relationship with the rest of creation.

In this theory of the atonement, the cross is the place where our old “tainted” human nature dies and our new human nature is “summed up” or “recapitulated” in Jesus.

The ancient theologians felt that this was one of the most crucial things that happened on the cross.  One compared it to a painted portrait.  “If a portrait becomes distorted and stained,” he said, “the artist doesn’t throw the canvas away, but the subject of the portrait has to sit for it again, and then the likeness is re-drawn on the same material.”

We don’t sit for hand-painted portraits that much anymore, so perhaps a more contemporary analogy is the radio program Q.  When it became tainted by scandal, the only way to save it was to completely rebrand it.

The producers didn’t cancel the show, but they “summed it up” so to speak, under a brand new host.

Metaphors are limited, but in a way, this is what God has done for human nature in the person of Jesus Christ.  He recapitulated it with a brand new host.  Like it says in one place, “His purpose was to sum all things up in Christ.”

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