Report on a lecture given at Trinity College, Parkville on the 12 th of August and reflections from Philip Harvey, for the pew notes of St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne Last Tuesday Susan Bell, Bishop of Niagara, gave the Barry Marshall Lecture in Melbourne on the priest and poet George Herbert (1593-1633). Priest and poet are roles inextricably bound together in the person of Herbert, something she painfully (in the early modern sense of ‘going to pains’) described. She remarked that “all his writing is about vocation to Christianity.” Son of one of the leading families of the realm, u niversity orator, courtier and diplomat, he was “a man on the way up when it all came to a screeching halt.” Herbert decided to enter holy orders, possibly due to health. He married Jane Danvers in 1629, went to work in the small parish of Bemerton near Salisbury, where presently he died, probably of consumption. His poetry, Bishop Bell called it “winsome”...
‘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...