The heart appears to be of great interest to cultures around the world, and one Christian thinker, Naugle, suggests that we would benefit from considering the heart as a fundamental and universal faculty of thinking and feeling. Naugle was challenging the practice in the social sciences and humanities of disparaging or “dropping” the heart as a working paradigm for thinking about human experience. In response to Naugle, this paper outlines five paradoxes of the heart. Is the heart good, according to the Bible? Why is such a complex concept so easy to translate? And how does the size, the gender, and the life of the heart affect the way we understand it as a faculty of thinking and feeling?