Christian Women at University: Faith, Feminism and Feeling at Home

University is a unique time of change and development, including in faith. Christian Women at University takes seriously the ordinary experiences, faith lives and intersectional identities of women studying away from home. Women encounter complex barriers to feeling at home, including sexism, conservative theologies, mental ill-health, homesickness, and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. These factors intersect with students’ marginalized identities, including their race, sexuality and class. As Christians, their churches, chaplaincies and student Christian societies are important spaces for belonging and making friends, helping them grow in faith. This book uncovers the resources and strategies that Christian women employ in trying to feel at home at university. Christian Women at University deepens our understanding of women’s lived faith in transitional times. It highlights how women studying at university negotiate complex challenges and intersecting identities as they attempt to feel at home in the context of overwhelming change. Morgans offers fresh and deep insights into how female Christian university students negotiate their new environment and their own developing identities. Learning how they make a home for themselves shows us wider truths about where comfort, challenge, and growth may lie for young women of faith today. Jenny''s work is a must read for anyone interested in the pastoral care of Christian women attending university. Her attentive listening to their experiences of ''leaving and seeking home'' has resulted in thoughtful, nuanced, and helpful reflections. I thoroughly recommend this important and timely book. Jenny Morgans’ impressive study conveys wide and deep knowledge of young women’s transition to university and the impact of this on their identity and faith. There is authority in her account of this complex transition, borne out of her own experience, thorough engagement with relevant literature, her own qualitative research and work as a university chaplain. Every page is thick with learning, yet the learning is carried lightly and the clarity of the writing makes for a compelling read. This book about the faith of emerging young women at university makes a highly creative and significant contribution to research into young adult faith. I cannot speak too highly of it. This is a thoughtful, carefully researched study of the lives of young Christian women as they negotiate the challenges of UK higher education. While identity fluidity has become a byword for younger generations, it is rare to find research that explores this phenomenon empirically while taking seriously the ways in which faith identities are entangled with gender, sexuality and a sense of home. Morgans'' book steers us back to these difficult questions, confronting what it means to embody Christian faith over time and in dialogue with the complexities of the 21st century university. The experience of university is a unique time of change and development, not least in terms of faith. Christian Women at University takes seriously the faith lives and ordinary experiences of women in this context. Examining the intersectional identities and faith stories of 26 Christian emerging women studying at university in England, it is concerned with the resources and strategies that the women utilized in crafting a home for themselves at university, when away from the familial home for the first time. Being women and belonging to the Christian faith, the women encountered barriers to feeling at home, including sexism on their academic course, conservative theologies in their church, as well as struggling with their mental health, homesickness or the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. These factors intersected with students’ marginalized identities, including their race, sexuality and class. However, their gender provided an avenue for the women to feel safe and to grow at university, especially though close friendships with other women, and their faith also provided contexts for feeling at home, including in their churches, chaplaincies and student Christian societies, in which the women felt safe enough to be themselves and even to begin to explore the breadth and depth of Christianity.Christian Women at University seeks to deepen our understanding of women’s lived faith in transitional times. It highlights how women in university negotiate the twists and turns, and backwards steps as they attempt to ‘make home’ away from home and facing the challenges of their intersecting identities of age, gender, faith, race, class and sexuality, all in the context of overwhelming change.

• | Author: Jenny Morgans
• | Publisher: SCM Press
• | Publication Date: Oct 31, 2025
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9780334061960
• | ISBN-10: 0334061962