Through an ethnographic rendering of the Catholic Church at the Detroit-Windsor borderland, this article foregrounds the ways elemental forces, including water, earth/soil, and air, form an interconnected entity that constitutes part of the theopolitical and religious scaffolding of Holy Infrastructures. We argue that the repetitive inscription of social and affective flows within an urban terrain generates infrastructure projects that contract forces of variable intensity into alliance or disjuncture. The interrelation of these forces as Holy Infrastructure, offers vital information on (dis/en)abling racialized forms of hosting and being hosted by the divine within urban settings, specifically as it pertains to theological labor at multiple scales. Indeed, we understand holiness in Catholic Detroit as a performative sovereignty of partition that mediates a desire for unbrokenness and spatiotemporal rapture. The topologies of Holy Infrastructure thus give rise to overlapping but divergent “wholes” within the racialized urban terrain, offering insight into the Church as a loose network of horizontal alliances that may enforce or subvert hierarchy. Our focus on elemental forces allows us to move beyond abstractions and focus on how theological projects take shape in physical space within an urban ecology. Indeed, Holy Infrastructures come into focus most clearly in relation to the intersection of theology with environmental, climatic, and territorial projects. By approaching Church and State as co-constitutive, we show how Holy Infrastructures offer insight into the racialized and gendered terrain of contemporary Detroit.

通过对底特律-温莎边境天主教堂的民族志描绘，本文突出了包括水、土和空气在内的元素力量如何形成一个相互关联的实体，该实体构成了神圣基础设施的神政治和宗教脚手架的一部分。我们认为，城市地形中社会和情感流动的重复铭文产生了基础设施项目，这些项目将不同强度的力量收缩为联盟或分裂。这些力量作为神圣基础设施的相互关系，提供了关于在城市环境中（禁止/启用）种族化形式的接待和被神的接待的重要信息，特别是因为它涉及多个尺度的神学劳动。事实上，我们将天主教底特律的圣洁理解为一种表现性的分区主权，它调解了对不间断和时空狂喜的渴望。因此，神圣基础设施的拓扑结构在种族化的城市地形中产生了重叠但发散的“整体”，提供了对教会作为松散的水平联盟网络的洞察力，可能会强化或颠覆等级制度。我们对基本力量的关注使我们能够超越抽象，关注神学项目如何在城市生态的物理空间中形成。事实上，神圣基础设施在神学与环境、气候和领土项目的交叉点上最明显地成为焦点。通过将教会和国家视为共同构成，我们展示了神圣基础设施如何提供对当代底特律的种族化和性别化地形的洞察。