“The Eternal Modernity of the Church”: Art in the Sugar Mill and the University in the Philippines Available to Purchase

The chapter discusses two Catholic churches in the Philippines, both built in the 1950s, to reflect on the production of religious and secular knowledge through the modernity of architecture. These churches were located in a sugar mill and a university, designed by local and foreign architects. Discussion of these churches implicates the colonial contexts of religion and the idea of the university, on the one hand, and the kind of modernity arising from this set of circumstances and concepts during the Cold War, on the other. Notions of site-specific and tropical form and a possible horizontal condition of worship find space in this effort to shed light on the relationship between religion and modernity in the wake of colonialism and in light of the democratic imperative in a postcolonial nation such as the Philippines. Finally, the chapter tries to contribute to the discourse of political theology through art history.