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 3.8: Clean Slate



In the 2012 movie, Batman Returns, one of Cat Woman’s driving motivations was her desire for a clean slate.

As you might imagine, she has a pretty sordid history as an international cat-burglar, and, like all of us in the age of social media, every detail of her past is on record somewhere on the world-wide-web, making it impossible for her to escape the past.

But word on the streets of Gotham is that someone has developed a powerful computer program called “The Clean Slate” which will erase your entire internet record from every database on the planet, all with the simple click of a single button. And for reasons that are perhaps obvious, Cat Woman would do anything to get her hands on it.

In this respect, Cat Woman is more than just a comic-book super-villain, she is also a metaphor for us all. At least, the way data about us accumulates on the internet until it starts to define and control us, is one of the growing social issues of our day.

Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain uses the term “reputational bankruptcy” to talk about all this. The web never forgets, he reminds us, and as more and more of our lives are lived online, it becomes increasingly difficult to escape the impact of our digital footprints.

“What we need,” Zittrian argues, “is some way to declare ‘reputation bankruptcy and start over. Like: If the internet allowed you a one-time pulling of a lever that would delete your digital identity and you could just start fresh.”

The concept of “reputational bankruptcy” is a helpful image for something the Bible calls “Justification by Faith.”

The idea is that we are justified—saved from the sins of the past and saved for a relationship with God—not by works—keeping the Old Testament Law or adhering to some human-defined moral code or what have you—but through Faith in Jesus Christ.

Strictly speaking, the term “justification” is a legal term that describes a judge rendering a not-guilty verdict in a court of law. To be justified, in this sense, is to be declared not-guilty.

But what, exactly, does this mean? How does God declare us “not guilty” on the basis of our faith in Christ, and what does this justification actually look like for us in real life?

This is where the Clean Slate comes in handy. Because in the same way that all the digital data that’s accumulated about us on the internet has all sorts of implications for our present—impacting our ability to get a job, to secure a bank-loan, to get a date, and so on—so much so that our digital identity can come to define us in all sorts of unhealthy ways—so too with sin.

Biblically, sin is not just about the moral failings of the past that need forgiveness, it is about how these moral failings define us and have all sorts of implications for our present: our ability to serve God, our ability to commune with him, our ability to take our place as one of his people. We don’t just need them forgiven, we need a brand new spiritual identity.

Justification by Faith is for our spiritual identities, what the Clean Slate is to our digital identities.

On the cross, Christ stands in our place as our fully-human representative—the Second Adam is what the Bible calls him—and through his own death on the cross, he puts to death the entire sin-record of our lives—he cancelled the accusation that stood against us, is how the Bible puts it, nailing it to the cross.

Through his death on the cross, he wipes the slate clean, and then, through his resurrection on the other side, he offers us a brand new identity to live, untied with his resurrected life.

In a very real way, putting our faith in Christ is like declaring “reputational bankruptcy” and so allowing God to “justify us”—to wipe the record clean so that Christ’s identity can now define us.

And, like it says in one place: “Having been justified like this through faith, we now have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

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