Third Order is “a quarterly webzine publishing literary stories that tackle matters of faith and religion,” and edited by Karen Osborne. The zine publishes all genres, “with a special focus on science fiction, fantasy, and experimental fiction.” Contents of the current issue—illustrated by Elizabeth Seelye—include:
“Prince of Wolves” by Sabrina Naples
“The Master’s Eggs” by Christopher Kastensmidt
“Tea House Dreams” by Diane Gallant
“In Antigua” by Kevin Shaw
At the moment, Third Order is actively soliciting stories for their 2008 and 2009 issues, and Osborne notes that they’ve changed their expected turnaround time on submissions: “Response time is now one week for rejections and one to eight weeks for acceptances.”
She’s paying $20 for stories up to 4,000 words, and $30 for stories between 4,000 and 10,000 words, for three-month exclusivity on new stories (no reprints). Full guidelines are available on this page.
Osborne describes the idea behind the zine: “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.”