In her acclaimed book on the "twenty-somethings" between the ages of seventeen and thirty, Sharon Parks underscores the critically important role of the mentor, the mentoring environment, and mentoring communities as contexts that nurture the vital growth of young adults toward maturity and wholeness in becoming at home in the world. These mentoring environments serve young adults with a network of belonging that can "offer a powerful milieu and a critical set of gifts in the formation of meaning, purpose, and faith." (1) Parks intentionally frames her work in the larger context of faith as a human universal that is integral to all human life and related to meaning, trust, and hope (p. 16). Indeed, she ultimately associates faith with the "act of composing and being composed by meaning ... some conviction of what is ultimately true, real, dependable within the largest frame imaginable" (p. 20).
