Number 15 (2016)

Dear Readers:

We are pleased to share with you this the fifteenth edition of Growth: The Journal of the Association for Christians in Student Development. For fifteen years, Growth has strived to provide readers with relevant original research and pertinent professional development to aid in our work with college students. We trust that you have found this information useful to your work and that you will find the articles and book reviews in this current issue to be helpful in informing your work as educators.

This year, you will discover six feature articles including research on the first year experience as it relates to spiritual formation and best practices, the impact of technology, and the intersection of Christianity and racial justice. These articles are followed by a collection of book reviews that are intended to introduce us to new publications that will guide and shape our efforts as student development practitioners.

We are grateful to those who work to make Growth possible, including Dr. Jason Morris, Assistant Professor of Higher Education at Abilene Christian University who serves in the role of Book Review Editor, and Britney Graber, a graduate student from Taylor University who serves as the Assistant Editor. They, along with our peer review team, have put forth great effort to produce an edition that represents strong scholarship and is diverse in its coverage of topics.

We particularly want to encourage you, the reader, to consider submitting manuscripts for consideration for future issues of Growth; the next edition will be published in the spring of 2017. Publication guidelines are included in this issue on the inside of the back cover and are also available via the Association for Christians in Student Development web site: www.acsd.org/participate/write-for-growth-journal/. We are especially interested in manuscripts presenting original or basic research and encourage anyone who has recently completed a graduate thesis or dissertation to submit an article.

We as a publication team would like to thank you for your support of Growth: The Journal of the Association for Christians in Student Development. we hope your read will be both engaging and challenging.

Sincerely,
Skip Trudeau, Co-Editor
Tim Herrmann, Co-Editor