Klaipėdos universitetas

Collaboration skills, multicultural awareness, and intercultural sensitivity are essential to the careers of maritime business professionals. The self-development of a multiculturally conscious personality contributes to ensuring safety in the maritime business. Researchers point out that more attention in the maritime industry should be paid to the employee’s personality than to increasing automation of shipping processes. The heterogeneity of employee teams at the national and religious levels is associated with the problem of increased psychoemotional stress. Instead of emphasizing the teaching of intercultural communication rules, it is appropriate to enable future maritime business professionals to cultivate values, to realize their cognitive interests, to understand that the culture or religion of their colleagues is existentially dear to them, and to be open to a culture of dialogue. Therefore, the article presents more relevant methodological prerequisites for the development of multicultural self-awareness and religious tolerance in the spirit of Neo-Thomism, theistic humanism, personalism, and constructivism.

In this article I present the rudiments of a theoretical approach to the religious field in Lithuania. These reflections are part of an ongoing process of designing a research project on religious and moral pluralism. Religious pluralism is a fairly recent feature of East-Central European societies. When religion was suppressed by the socialist regimes after World War II, the church, especially the Catholic Church, be-came part of a polarized social experience built upon the dichotomy of the state versus the unified nation. In many countries the church established itself as the guardian of a national Christian tradition and claimed a moral monopoly on people’s values. Appearing as gross oversimplifications, presented in the article theoretical reflections can serve as helpful stepping-stones in the process of combining theoretical models and grassroots ethnography.