At the beginning of this book, I described the project reported on here as an ethnography of contact. In the present chapter, I will examine directly some of the multifarious aspects of the cultural encounter that constituted a central feature of Lighthouse School and its work.

Like other academics working in the social sciences and humanities in the early 21st century, I have learned to be suspicious of the term ‘culture’. I certainly do not believe that any individual is wholly or even largely defined by cultural factors, and I am extremely skeptical of ‘culture’ as a stand-alone explanation for any person’s behavior. At the same time, also like many academics, I acknowledge that the term still has its uses. In the present chapter, I will do my best to follow Appadurai’s (1996) practice of using the adjective ‘cultural’ while avoiding the reifying noun ‘culture’ itself wherever possible. In a social sense, I do believe that the phenomenon referred to in popular parlance as ‘culture’ is shorthand for a (socially and therefore humanly) real complex of values, practices and assumptions that play a highly significant role in social interactions, though I see it as an influence on, rather than as a determiner of, human actions, attitudes and desires.

It was certainly the case that Lighthouse School represented an encounter between at least two such complexes. One, which I will call imprecisely ‘North American evangelical culture’, found itself embedded in a second that (equally vaguely) I will call ‘Polish Catholic culture’. These two complexes included differing and often competing values and practices. Each in turn comprised one important religious or spiritual dimension (evangelical, Catholic) and one regional and linguistic one (North American, Polish).