The Postgrad Initiative
Serving Master's students, doctoral students and post-docs, the initiative comprises five projects working together in pursuit of a common vision:
E-Network
Our Network newsletter provides monthly study resources, stories from postgraduate groups, and news about events, all aimed at helping postgrads explore the intersection between their Christian faith and their academic endeavour, arising from a gospel-shaped understanding of its intellectual foundations and purposes.
If you are a Master’s, doctoral or post-doctoral student within the region of IFES Europe, and would like to join the network and receive updates on relevant resources and events, please see the Network page for more information or subscribe below.
Association
Our Association of Christian Postgraduate Groups provides an umbrella for self-led local postgraduate groups who would like to benefit from the encouragement and profile of connectivity with similar groups across Europe sharing the same vision and values. We also offer resourcing, mentoring and summer conferences for group leaders: in 2025 the conference will take place in Germany. For more information, see the Association page.
Conferences
Forming a Christian Mind conferences in Cambridge are biannual events focussed around a topical theme. In 2024-2025 the focus will be on ‘Exploring the Human’, marking the 35 year anniversary since the publication of Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, taking it as a prompt to consider how Christian academics can maintain a robustly Christian account of the human in their scholarship, and how such an understanding of the human should shape their attitude to teaching, pastoral and departmental responsibilities.
For more information, see the Forming a Christian Mind website.
Fellows Programme
The Fellows Programme is a 22-week term-time intensive development course for an annual cohort of up to 10 PhD students with seminars, discussion of guided reading, and supported practical exercises. These include the writing of an essay demonstrating the outworking of a Christian worldview in their field, and the delivery of a TED-style evangelistic talk rooted from within their research. For more information, see the Fellows Programme page.
Resources, Research and Development
At the heart of our ministry is the recognition that there is more work to be done by evangelicals in this arena. So our resource-development work, The Gospel and Academia Project (GAP), seeks to strengthen an evangelical contribution to the wider faith-and-scholarship conversation by providing a dedicated space for those whose primary confessional commitments are clear, but who would like to help each other fill what is often perceived as a ‘gap’ in this arena.
The project commenced with a theological focus on the three shared foundational values which partners have identified as being essential for practical evangelical partnership. The second phase has recently begun alongside it and focusses on commissioning discipline-specific case study examples, annotated bibliographies and contributions on specific themes which feed into the wider Good News for the University ministries.
