Jayeel Serrano Cornelio

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN THE PHILIPPINES: FROM LEGALITIES TO LIVED EXPERIENCE

In the Summer 2013 issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs, experts on eight countries of East/Southeast Asia—China (Fenggang Yang), Indonesia (Robert W. Hefner), Singapore (Mathew Mathews), the Philippines (Jayeel Cornelio), Burma (Mikael Gravers), Vietnam (James F. Lewis), Laos (Stephen Bailey), and Japan (Kevin Cooney) assess the state of existing scholarly research on religious freedom. In most cases they find that serious scholarly research focused directly on religious freedom is a rarity. They offer theories to explain the past patterns of research on religion, and make detailed recommendations for future research projects on religious freedom that would enrich the multi-disciplinary field of Asian Studies.Religious freedom has been a key facet of its various Constitutions since the day the Philippines became Asias first democratic republic in 1899. The immediate religious context of the Philippines, however, renders these provisions difficult to uphold consistently. The Catholic Church remains influential to politics and policy formulation, and at the same time the religious landscape is increasingly diverse due to immigration. Past academic discussion on religious freedom in the Philippines has been mainly among legal scholars. In the future greater attention should be focused on the subjective and everyday experience of religious freedom.

Popular Religion and the Turn to Everyday Authenticity: Reflections on the Contemporary Study of Philippine Catholicism

The seminal works on everyday religion in the Philippines that appeared in the 1960s were motivated by pastoral concerns. Since the 1990s, however, there has been a growing interest in everyday religion as authentic expressions of what it means for individuals to be Catholic. This turn in the scholarship of social scientists and religious scholars has been driven less by the question of secularization than the demand for religion’s local relevance. This article explores the conditions under which the turn to authenticity has emerged in Philippine studies: the socioeconomic contexts, the expansion of the social sciences, the changing attitudes to religious institutions, and the emergence of local theological reflections.

Billboard advertising and sexualisation in Metro Manila

Several billboard ads in Metro Manila have stirred controversy in the past decade for using images suggesting sexual acts or revealing private body parts. Politicians and church leaders have criticised them as being ‘indecent’ or ‘pornographic’. But in spite of this advertising strategy being abandoned, a fresh wave of billboards in Metro Manila has continued to use sexualised images, arguably in innovative ways. A content analysis of some of these billboards suggests that two representational techniques are emergent: purposive and referential. Public criticisms have then been strategically circumvented.The discourses that have surrounded billboard sexualisation in Metro Manila unravel the moral conservatism of religious institutions and the state. The purposive and referential techniques on billboards are an attempt to navigate such conservatism. Two possibilities are discernible. As the attention is on viewers’ imagination, the referential technique affords space for the cultural critique of these norms. In contrast, the purposive technique is limited as it focuses on the product’s benefit to the customer. This has led to the reinforcement of sexual stereotypes concerning masculinity and femininity, for example. The article ends by reflecting on the state of sexualisation in Metro Manila.