Doing University God’s Way: A Student’s Musings on Higher Education

What makes a meaningful university experience? How can I make sense of my studies through my faith? In a vastly secularised world, what might I stand to lose or gain as a result?

I found myself asking these questions just a few months after beginning my undergraduate studies in English Literature at the National University of Singapore (NUS). In and out of classes, my student experience was saturated with a diversity of worldviews, and undergirding the critical verve of this academic context was an impulse (both prompted and unprompted) to question aggressively what I knew about the world and how I knew it.

It was with these questions on my heart that I picked up the FES monograph Cultivating the Christian Mind: Conference Proceedings 2024 and 2026. I was as much drawn in by the blurb of the book, which centered on “what it means to learn and live faithfully in the modern university”, as I was at the colorful negative space lettering on its cover.

In the first section, multiple responses tackled, head-on, two of the biggest watchwords that I believe have consistently unnerved Christians seeking to reconcile their faith with the university context – the liberality of the modern university, and postmodernism, the intellectual movement which heralded an end to all forms of truth and truth claims. In my field of literary studies, the latter, in particular, is commonly associated with the death of religious authority and the advent of an irrefutably relative sense of morality.

Ranen (first from left) at the Cultivating the Christian Mind 2026 conference

I found that the responses in the monograph were precise and substantive in approaching these issues. Through my reading, I better understood how some of the university’s greatest institutional strengths, like autonomy and criticality, can, when taken to dangerous extremes of relativism and skepticism, shape a secular environment which may pose profound challenges to one’s faith. Many wrongful assumptions regarding these labels (and frankly, unhelpful ‘us versus them’ attitudes) I had were deconstructed in this process. From a sense of trepidation, I became encouraged by an understanding of the foundations of the institution I spend five days a week in – further, emboldened to take fuller rein of my Christian intellectual walk – and, in Dr. Leow Theng Huat’s words, “to shape the Christian faith according to the opportunities presented to us, even as we keep in mind the dangers and challenges faced” (40).

What I found doubly invaluable was the hands-on approach invited by the second half of the monograph, particularly the section authored by Dr. Christopher Watkin on deconstructing the assumptions that underpin our disciplines. This brought the broader contextualisation of the university as a modern institution and its ideological tenets into a specific, personal foreground. The systematic breakdown offered a helpful framework to see how my field of study posited a certain standard of “ultimate meaning” (72) and, correspondingly, the questions it could and could not answer. Taking this as a point of departure for my own journey has been instrumental in being critical about the merits and limitations of my field of study, even as I am taught to be critical within, testing and sharpening and yielding this area of my life to Christ as ‘ultimate meaning’, to His divine ontology.

As someone who has always been assured of the veracity (and complexity) of scholarship regarding the Bible and theology at large, it has been difficult to view the field as approachable to the average person. I have thus found it illuminating to hear and receive closely from individuals questioning the very spaces and standards of academic rigour they labour within and am grateful to FES for putting this monograph together. If anything, it has spurred me on not to leave the integration of faith and academics to the professionals. I look forward to working out the breadth of my unanswered questions, donning that spiritual armour that Paul exhorts us to in Ephesians to pursue them all the way to and till the end – to find Christ in all and through all.

As a student, I am vastly afraid of everything I do not know. But as a Christian, I find courage to continue facing these intellectual unknowns. I hope that through reading this book you will be encouraged to do the same.

— Ranen Tan is a Year 3 English Literature student serving as the Honorary Treasurer of NUS VCF.

Cultivating the Christian Mind: Conference Proceedings 2024 and 2026 is available at $10 per copy at the FES Library. Individual e-books of the 2024 and 2026 conferences are available at Kobo. 

Editor’s Note: This book review is part of our August news on ‘Hospitality and Welcome’! We invite students to consider what it means to be good hosts and guests in receiving and evaluating the different perspectives, worldviews, and fields of knowledge encountered on campus. As we mark the return to school for our university ministries, the planning of CF calendars and the immersion in campus life and study, this month’s feature article reminds us that behind every ministry activity lie deeper questions about why we gather, welcome, and serve.