About

Third Order is a literary webzine created to engage with issues of faith and religion through mainstream, traditional, experimental and speculative short fiction. We’re associated with Sacred Earthlings, a blog about faith, fiction and everything in between.

We work on the presumption that faith and religion reach out, in some way, to all people; that they fire both mass movements and single human hearts; and that, instead of being forgotten remnants of a bygone age, they are crucial elements of what it means to be human in the modern world.

The term “third order” refers to tertiary groups affiliated with Catholic religious orders of men and women, such as the Franciscans and the Dominicans. Often, the members of these “third orders” are laypeople searching for a way to live out their faith, their questions, their grey areas, and their dreams in an imperfect world. We hope that the stories in Third Order will be very much the same, and that authors will feel free to explore issues of faith and religion in their stories, whether those stories are realistic or fantastic. Although the name is Catholic, this magazine aims to publish stories from all faith traditions, including fictional ones.

This is a nonprofit web market created for the love of the subject. For submission information and compensation, click on “Guidelines.”

Your editor is Karen Osborne, a writer, columnist, film editor and videographer from Baltimore, MD.

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photo credit: Preach It, Brother via photopin (license)