Being Catholic in the Contemporary Philippines: Young People Reinterpreting Religion by Jayeel Serrano Cornelio (review)

Stemming from Jayeel Cornelio's doctoral thesis at the National University of Singapore, Being Catholic in the Contemporary Philippines: Young People Reinterpreting Religion is a serious and incisive study by a sociologist of religion. It bears the marks of the author's visiting studentship in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University and postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. Although the book is about religious youth in the Philippines, it engages with the global scholarship on religious identity, which is laid out in chapters 1 and 2.

The first chapter underscores the study's significance in terms of the expansion and vibrancy of Christianity in the Global South. "As Christianity continues to spread and evolve around the world, young people cannot be expected to be passive recipients of a unified set of beliefs and practices. They have their own generational contexts and influences that allow them to 'create new forms of Christianity with new markers of fluency and authenticity'" (5). How young people "create new forms" of religiosity—"create" is a keyword—underlies the study's main question: "What does being Catholic mean to Filipino youth today?" (8).

This question requires an examination of religious identity, which the author explains in the second chapter as referring to "personal religious meanings, or how one sees and understands the self as having or identifying with a religion" (16). Cornelio asserts that, in contrast to the checklist approach used in quantitative studies, a narrative approach enables the study of "identity construction as a continuous process" (23). He claims that "the centrality of personal meaning . . . distinguishes [his] approach" from other studies (24). Cornelio justifies the focus on religious self-understanding based on three considerations: the hybridity of everyday religion, the susceptibility of religious institutions to change by ordinary believers, and the instability of religious authority in modern societies.

At the outset, Cornelio posits a caveat that, given the fluidity of identity, "The personal attributes of my informants' religious identity may be taken to be the inevitable consequence of the very question this book is asking" (27). In other words, the study's findings may be an artifact of its methodology: adopt a different approach, and other elements of identity may surface. Cornelio dismisses this hazard (27–28) in view of the divergent responses his study generated.

Chapter 3 elaborates on the study's "theoretical sampling" (38) strategy: the selection of sixty-two Metro Manila university students, who are active participants in students' religious organizations, in a manner that captures the range of institutions, academic disciplines, and organizational orientations (e.g., liturgical, Charismatic, outreach oriented), in addition to class and gender. This chapter also specifies the themes the author pursued in his one-on-one interview of informants. It includes a refreshingly frank discussion about the interview process, which evolved as the study progressed, and about the author's role as researcher, who was born to a Catholic family, giving him "empirical literacy" in Catholicism (49; cf. 169), but moved on "to what is known as Born Again Christianity in the Philippines during [his] adolescence," affording him "considerable distance as an academic researcher" (49).

What Cornelio does not address are the limitations of the narrative approach and the possibility that interviewee statements may or may not jibe with their everyday practices. The study's focus may not have been on lived religion, but the rich description of the Taizé worship (75–76) and other anecdotes (144–45) give the impression that in his fieldwork Cornelio went beyond the narrative approach to engage in participant observation. The deliberate collection of such ethnographic data could have complemented narrative research.

Provocatively titled "Will the real Catholic please stand up?," chapter 4 presents biographical notes on three students who "exemplify the richness of Catholic identity among young people today" (71). The first student represents orthodox youths, who...