READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

    ‘Lower than the Angels: a history of Sex and Christianity’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch, published by Allen Lane, 2024. This review first appeared in the patronal issue of The Parish Paper at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne, June 2025.   Anyone familiar with Diarmaid MacCulloch’s breadth and depth of research and his powers of synthesis is inspired anew by his latest big-picture history of Christianity. His confessed purpose is to unsettle settled ideas. Indeed, when it comes to his chosen subject of sex, the reader must reconsider all manner of lifetime assumptions, left wondering what conclusions can be drawn.   Just two assumptions are enough for starters. 1.      There have always been church weddings. This assumption is flatly disproven by MacCulloch. The church in early centuries had remarkably little to do with the ceremonies of marriage, a fact supported by a complete lack of any liturgical evidence. Blessings of marriag...

  Photographs of the show by Jody Jane Stitt fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders Lane, Melbourne Review by Philip Harvey   The nighttown episode of Ulysses, set in the red-light district of Dublin, invites the reader by every imaginable literary trick or treat to experience both the strange otherworld of the Hibernian Metropolis and the inexplicable creations of the individual unconscious. In his schema for the novel, James Joyce prescribed the creative technique ‘hallucination’ for this episode. Hallucination is an abiding form of character presentation (both animate and inanimate characters) throughout. It is also, in Flaubertian manner, an effect whereby Joyce would induce, seduce and influence the sensitive reader. But how do you make hallucination happen onstage?   One answer is in this year’s Bloomsday in Melbourne production. The collective obsession of the scriptwriters for this episode, the longest in the novel, has prompted all their best and worst instinc...

  Review by Philip Harvey first published in Text, Vol. 29, Issue 1, April 2025. Thanks to the editors Aidan Coleman and Verity Oswin.   Kevin Hart ‘Lands of likeness : for a poetics of contemplation’ University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2023   ‘Dark-Land : memoir of a secret childhood’ Paul Dry Books, Philadelphia, 2024   I   The copious, sprawling, adventurous Gifford lectures found in Kevin Hart’s ‘Lands of Likeness’ are claimed to be focused in the first instance on contemplation, and then on contemplation and modern poetry. In other words, two of the abiding preoccupations of this author: (1) the primarily religious question of prayer, how we as humans relate to God and the world; and (2) why we turn our language into poetic forms, and why we do that in the context of a world recovering from modernity.   However, the lectures chart the altering understanding of the term ‘contemplation’ itself, with strong accent on cultural definitio...