The starting point for reflections on the paradoxes of Christian culture is Nietzsche’s announcement of the “death of God” and an increasingly common belief that European culture has ceased to seek its inspiration in Christianity. It seems, however, that the paradoxical tension between continuity and break is part of the very essence of Christianity with its constant oscillation between, to use H.R. Niebuhr’s terminology, the poles of Christ and culture. The coming together of the ambivalent symbols of the root and the salt, mentioned in the title, culminates in the figure of the cross embodying the seemingly contradictory but in fact inseparable relations of culture and Christianity: rootedness and uprootedness. Biblical, early Christian (The Epistle to Diognetus) and contemporary (Simone Weil) texts, read in the context of 20th-century missionary testimonies (Trappist monks of Tibhirine), reveal a possibility of once again making the Christian demand for universalism part of the postmodern, multicultural world.
This article concentrates on a new understanding of multicultural societies which emerges from routine interaction between recent and established individuals in various urban spaces. The question of the actual interaction with multicultural population has been largely overlooked in research on Polish migration. Therefore, by exploring the notions of conviviality and convivial cultures, this paper demonstrates how post-2004 Polish presence increasingly affects everyday relations with the local population in both Manchester and Barcelona. The research findings, mainly from the narrative interviews with Polish migrant women, shed light on how convivial cultures emerge and how cultural identities are negotiated in everyday encounters in various spaces of the city, including organisational niches, neighbourhoods, family spaces, schools and colleges, and workplaces. Convivial experiences of Polish migrant women with multicultural population are characterised by constant transformation of multiple identities shaped by personal biographies, experiences of gender and other social categories, which are often shared with other groups and individuals.
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