Number 20 (2021)

Dear Readers:

We are pleased to share with you the twentieth edition of Growth: The Journal of the Association for Christians in Student Development. For twenty 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 four feature articles including original research focusing on self-authorship, student experiences, and engaging as a believer in the secular academy. 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 possible, including Julia VanderMolen, TRIO Coordinator at Calvin University, who serves in the role of Book Review Editor, as well as the Associate Editor in Chief, Austin Smith, and the Associate Editors, Eli Casteel and Nick Dennig, who have provided guidance to the review of materials and publication processes of the journal. Additionally, we would like to thank Lucy Man, the Marketing Coordinator for Housing and Residence Life at Pepperdine University, who provided our graphic design and layout this year. 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 2022. 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. 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.

The 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 reading of it will be both engaging and challenging.

Sincerely,

Dr. Skip Trudeau, Co-Editor

Dr. Tim Herrmann, Co-Editor