Acknowledgments
First of all, we are grateful for the participation of more than 6,600 people who answered one of our questionnaire surveys at least once over a period of 20 years. And special thanks go to the over 850 people who accepted our invitation to personal interviews, to one or more faith development interviews. This book was not possible without your participation, thank you so much!
Second, there are many colleagues who cooperated in research projects: Ralph W. Hood, Professor in Psychology Department of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has always been co-leader in our common research projects for more than 20 years. His former student and now assistant professor at Sewanee, the University of the South, Christopher F. Silver was consistently active in the Chattanooga research teams. In the Bielefeld teams, Dr. Barbara Keller and Dr. Ramona Bullik served as field work managers, supervisors, interview trainers, and authors of many case studies and other texts. And we would also like to take this opportunity to thank all undergraduate and graduate students who were engaged in interviewing, setting up online surveys, evaluating faith development interviews, and contributing to the qualitative analysis of our data in Bielefeld and Chattanooga. The list of names of this great number of people would fill the rest of this page; they are noted in our previous project-specific book publications (Streib et al., 2009; Streib & Hood, 2016; Streib & Klein, 2018; Streib et al., 2022; Streib & Hood, 2024).
We are also very grateful for the contribution of two reviewers; their careful reading of the text and their comments and recommendations were very helpful in improving the manuscript.
This publication was made possible by grants from the John Templeton Foundation (52249; 60806; 61834) and grants from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).
The Open Access book production was funded by a grant from the Publication Fund of Bielefeld University.