Heart Of Flesh Literary Journal

It's so easy to get bogged down in this world -- to feel the weight of ugliness, hate, destruction, emptiness, and depression pushing down on us. If you're not careful, life will try its best to crush you. But something gentle exists outside of it, under the coarse fabric of things. There is a soft voice waiting for you to listen and hear. And it's so easy to drown it out, to overlook it, to pretend it doesn't exist, or simply not hear it through the noise.Jesus is the whisper in the chaos. Our contributors see Him in the peripheral, call out to Him from the dark places and wait for His voice, feel the peace in His gentle light, or recognize the weight of His absence in an absurd, seemingly meaningless world.In this issue, you'll find laughter and despair, the everyday moments and the sublime, brokenness and healing, pain and joy, and in everything, bubbling underneath the surface, Jesus -- waiting, whispering, and placing His finger on everything.

In Issue Five's eclectic mix of styles, voices, mediums, and backgrounds, you are about to embark on a journey formed by encounters of the past and visions of the future, all shaped by the author or artist's perception of the risen Savior. As those of us who have given our lives to Christ can tell you, once you know Him, you can't look at the past and not see His hand on everything. You can't mistake the presence of sin dripping over every moment like black tar, nor the dazzling occurrences of grace. Once you know the hope of Christ, you can no longer look into the future without being thrown into a prophetic imagining of epic proportions. By simply letting your mind grapple with the possibility of a better place, a better time, you can't help but let your mind wander into a future that rises glorious like a phoenix out of the ashes of corruption (a tired cliché, I know, but, I believe, an appropriate one). Consequently, the present time becomes a place of waiting and passing glimpses- a world full of questions and plaguing doubts, peaceful moments and wake-up calls, obedience and defiance, rebellions and acts of faith with nothing firm to hold onto except the miracles of the past and God's promises for the future. Being still becomes the catalyst for madness for some, patience and growth for others.You'll find all of this in Issue Five, and more.Thank you for reading!

Criticizes the patriarchal world view, outlines the historical realities that have produced a culture that glorifies violence and domination, and argues for a worldview that recognizes the full humanity of women.

In Heart of Flesh's sixth issue, there are a multitude of themes to explore. In these pages you'll find an exploration of doubt, faith, awe, reverence, and a desire to seek God, but also a common focus on relationships--the various interplays between people, nature, and the God who made them. Writers speak about seeing God reflected in loved ones, and experiencing nostalgia for those now gone or slipping away, who once emanated Christ's unconditional love. They talk about an ache for knowing God Himself--experiencing a hole where a relationship once existed or never was there to begin with. In their words they convey a longing to draw closer to Jesus, to find evidence of Him in the natural world, to rest in His arms in life's darker moments. Others express the frustration in attempting to shake the ones around us who can't see--to wake them up to His mercy and grace. These interactions are teased out through poetry, prose, and art, while presenting the contrast between what is in front of our eyes and what remains unseen, swirling around us in untouchable significance.You'll also find bulgy monsters, clones, "Jesus lice," and a talking fox.Yet somehow all these unique imaginations pull together as different pieces of the same picture of God's unfathomable love.I truly believe there is something in this issue for everybody, no matter your beliefs or opinions about the Creator of the world. I hope you read with an open mind, and that you allow these different pieces to speak their way into your life.

Chris Young became a Christian a few months ago. Now he writes to his older, wiser Uncle Bill, "I'd like to ask you... what part suffering will play in my life." Uncle Bill responds, and thus begins a series of personal letters from the seasoned Christian worker to encourage and guide his young relative in the Christian life. As we read these letters, we too gain great help and insight into how God transforms our character and fashions us into the image of Christ. The cross, suffering, transformation and God's ultimate purpose are the issues that unfold in this unique book by Gene Edwards. Though written for the new believer, it speaks with a depth and newness that will arrest even the most mature believer. The story spans time, space and eternity to deliver its beautiful, moving and profound message. The Inward Journey is the third of a three-book series entitled "Introduction to the Deeper Christian Life."

Examining the works of such Victorian writers as the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, this study discusses codes and taboos about the female body and explores how female sexuality was represented in Victorian literary and non-literary genres, such as painting, etiquette books and pornography.

In Ironies of Faith, celebrated Dante scholar and translator Anthony Esolen provides a profound meditation upon the use and place of irony in Christian art and in the Christian life. Beginning with an extended analysis of irony as an essentially dramatic device, Esolen explores those manifestations of irony that appear prominently in Christian thinking and art: ironies of time (for Christians believe in divine Providence, but live in a world whose moments pass away); ironies of power (for Christians believe in an almighty God who took on human flesh, and whose "weakness" is stronger than our greatest enemy, death); ironies of love (for man seldom knows whom to love, or how, or even whom it is that in the depths of his heart he loves best); and the figure of the Child (for Christians ever hear the warning voice of their Savior, who says that unless we become like unto one of these little ones, we shall not enter the Kingdom of God). Esolen's finely wrought study draws from Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Mauriac, Milton Herbert, Hopkins, and Dostoyevsky, among others, including the anonymous author of the medieval poem Pearl. Such authors, Anthony Esolen believes, teach us that the last laugh is on the world, because that grim old world, taking itself so seriously that even its laughter is a sneer, will finally - despite its proud resistance - be redeemed. That is the ultimate irony of faith. Readers who treasure the Christian literary tradition should not miss this illuminating book.

"A Door Behind a Door is loose, dreamy, and symbol-packed... The resurfacing of characters from Olga’s past in her new city speaks to the theme of immigration in the novel, of new homes and the passage from old to new—a passage that is perhaps not ever fully complete in the sense that the past cannot be shaken." —Marta Balcewicz, Ploughshares In Yelena Moskovich's spellbinding new novel, A Door Behind A Door, we meet Olga, who immigrates as part of the Soviet diaspora of ’91 to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There she grows up and meets a girl and falls in love, beginning to believe that she can settle down. But a phone call from a bad man from her past brings to life a haunted childhood in an apartment building in the Soviet Union: an unexplained murder in her block, a supernatural stray dog, and the mystery of her beloved brother Moshe, who lost an eye and later vanished. We get pulled into Olga’s past as she puzzles her way through an underground Midwestern Russian mafia, in pursuit of a string of mathematical stabbings.