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.

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!

Christians know that God loves them, but can easily feel that he is perpetually disappointed and frustrated, maybe even close to giving up on them. As a result, they focus a lot—and rightly so—on what Jesus has done to appease God’s wrath for sin. But how does Jesus Christ actually feel about his people amid all their sins and failures? This book draws us to Matthew 11, where Jesus describes himself as “gentle and lowly in heart,” longing for his people to find rest in him. The gospel flows from God’s deepest heart for his people, a heart of tender love for the sinful and suffering. These chapters take readers into the depths of Christ’s very heart for sinners, diving deep into Bible passages that speak of who Christ is and encouraging readers with the affections of Christ for his people. His longing heart for sinners comforts and sustains readers in their up-and-down lives.

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 (Confessions), Dante (The Divine Comedy), Shakespeare (The Tempest), and Tolkien (“Leaf, By Niggle”); Francois Mauriac (A Kiss for the Leper), Milton (Paradise Lost), and Alessandro Manzoni (The Betrothed); the poems of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Edmund Spenser (Amoretti); Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol), Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov), and the anonymous author of the medieval poem Pearl, among other works. Readers who treasure the Christian literary tradition should not miss this illuminating book.