I've been reading a galley of Raised? Finding Jesus by Doubting the Resurrection, by Jonathan K. Dodson and Brad Watson, pastors in Austin (Dodson) and Portland (Watson). The subtitle may hook some readers, while others (alas) may be inadvertently discouraged from opening the book. Dodson and Watson acknowledge, matter-of-factly, that "[t]he resurrection of a man from the dead was not easy to believe" in the time of Jesus, "nor is it easy to accept today." They write both for those who have never believed and for those who do believe, who have said the creeds and prayed the Lord's Prayer again and again yet who find themselves wondering, doubting, sometimes troubled by the undertones of a nagging question, sometimes staggered by a sudden conviction that the claim is utterly preposterous. (How could I have ever believed that?) Dodson and Watson's book is itself an act of pastoral ministry, a winsome invitation to faith and discipleship.

(By the way: If you are a believer who hasn't wrestled with doubt, don't let anyone bully you into thinking that your sense of belonging in God's family is somehow "superficial," that if you went through a dark night of the soul your faith would be more "authentic." We should neither stigmatize "doubt" nor wear it as badge of pride. What did Jesus say? We should receive the kingdom of God like a little child.)

There is no article about Easter in this issue of BOOKS & CULTURE, but the hope promised by the Resurrection sustains the whole enterprise. It undergirds the first piece in this issue—Stephen Williams reviewing Charles Taliferro's The Golden Cord: A Short Book on the Secular and the Sacred—and the last: Benjamin Myers on the "god-haunted" poems of Paul Mariani.

Also in this issue, Kirby Olson reviews a biography of the poet Marianne Moore, whom I love. Moore hasn't lacked for scholarly attention. Recently, thanks to the editorial labors of Heather Cass White, we've had two volumes that present Moore's poems from 1932 to 1941 in their earliest published form: A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932-1936 (ELS Editions, 2008) and Adversity & Grace: Marianne Moore, 1936-1941 (ELS Editions, 2012). Whether or not they share White's view of the arc of Moore's work, all readers of Moore should be grateful for these volumes: they are pure gold. As Olson writes, "Marianne Moore needs to be read on her own terms. A co-founder of American modernist poetry—with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and others—she has nevertheless been hard to place in any of the reigning narratives by which the story of that 'movement' and its meaning is told." In particular, Olson argues, scholars have been guilty of "stunning neglect of the orthodox religious dimension of Moore's poetry," a failure perpetuated in the book under review. So plenty of work remains to be done.

On the back of The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman (Viking, 2003), there's a wonderful array of praise from William Carlos Williams, H. D., T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and others. But my favorite is at the bottom of the dust jacket, from John Ashbery: "More than any modern poet, she gives us the feeling that life is softly exploding around us, within easy reach." I hope that—even if only in a modest way—every issue of B&C gives you that feeling as you read.

Sometimes, of course, the explosions aren't soft. Life shatters lives in an instant.

One of the pleasures of the mag is tracing the interplay among the articles. This issue features a guest column by Rick Ostrander on two books by missionary kids—a memoir and a novel. A few pages away, Andrea Palpant Dilley (herself the daughter of Quaker medical missionaries to Kenya) reviews a memoir by MK Megan Hustad. I'd like to see more on missionary grandkids. I'm one: my mom lived in China until she was 11 years old, and my grandma the missionary helped to raise me and my younger brother. Other missionary grandkids (there are a zillion of us): Sara Miles, Tanya Luhrmann, and Bill McKibben. And speaking of missions and Andrea Palpant Dilley: Don't miss her cover story for the January/February issue of CT magazine, "The World the Missionaries Made," centered on the pathbreaking scholarship of Robert Woodberry.

Anyone who has been exposed to the lucubrations of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew on environmental matters is in urgent need of an antidote. Fortunately one is close at hand. Fr. Michael Butler and Andrew P. Morriss have given us Creation and the Heart of Man: An Orthodox Christian Perspective on Environmentalism. This little book does more in its 91 pages than many treatises four or five times its length. Their first epigraph (the source of their title) is from Vladimir Lossky: At the center of the universe beats the heart of man. This would make excellent reading for a book group, paired with Bill McKibben's Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, reviewed by Jonathan Hiskes in our January/February issue. There are hints here—in the concluding quotation from Vladimir Solovyov, for instance—of a vein of sometimes unorthodox Orthodox thought that we will explore at greater length in B&C down the road, prompted in part by a fascinating book by George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), connected with the doctrine of theosis. (I'm hoping that somehow Matt Milliner—who teaches art history at Wheaton College and is also grounded in theology—will find a way to work this into a course, which I can audit.)

Fool! Are you so buried in your obscure books that you are blind to what's actually happening in the world right now—in Putin's Russia, for instance? Russia is dying! How can you prattle on about "esoteric futurism" and theosis at a time like this?

Rick Allnutt, the pastor of Faith Evangelical Covenant Church in Wheaton, where Wendy and I have been members for almost 20 years, took a trip to Russia a couple of years ago to meet with evangelical pastors and their congregations. Conditions were hard in every way: this was nothing like the Russia that will be featured at the Winter Olympics. And for these evangelicals, sadly, the Orthodox Church is for the most part an oppressive force, though there are blessed exceptions: evangelicals and Orthodox believers who see each other as fellow Christians, despite their differences. Nor is the fault all on one side.

Talk about "the environment" reminds me of the cover of this issue, juxtaposing a photo from the Battle of Verdun with a photo of the battlefield as it looks today. Philip Jenkins notes that the German offensive that set the battle in motion was code-named "Judgment" (Gericht).

Several weeks ago on Twitter, David Michael Bruno (@guynameddave) had this to say: "Just read Marsden's review of Hollinger in @booksandculture - so glad to be a subscriber again." He was referring to that superb piece by the historian George Marsden in the January/February issue of B&C—an issue that wouldn't have existed without the generous response by readers like you.

Since the start of the year, we have been receiving donations fulfilling pledges made last fall to support B&C in 2014. Thanks to all of you who have already done so. We continue working toward our goal of securing funding for 2015-18.

You may have seen the piece in our January/February issue devoted to Imagining the Kingdom, the second book in James K. A. Smith's trilogy-in-progress, Cultural Liturgies. Four young scholars at Westmont College—Jesse Covington, Maurice Lee, Sarah Skripsky, and Lesa Stern (each from a different discipline)—collaborated on a response to Smith's project, which is the most influential example of public theology in the last decade.

I love that phrase, "imagining the kingdom." In a way, that's what we're doing in B&C. We don't suppose that all is well on this earth, but neither are we shrugging our shoulders fatalistically. After all, the kingdom of God is at hand, even as we look forward to the restoration of all things. Thanks for helping us imagine the kingdom.

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