Cleaning and tidying, repenting and returning, and renewal, rebirth and resurrection are all profound human needs. It happens in every realm of human life, like, physical, financial, social, and of course, in moral and spiritual realms. There is something irreducibly human about the desire to start over. We feel it in the urge to throw open windows on the first mild morning of spring, to settle old debts, to write a letter of apology long overdue. Across every domain of life — financial, relational, physical, moral — we are creatures who reach, again and again, for the possibility of renewal. We are not content to remain in our accumulated disorder. Something within us insists that things can be otherwise. Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday , gives liturgical form to this insistence. It is the Church's great annual act of honesty: a forty-day acknowledgement that we have wandered, that we are not who we meant to be, and that the distance between where we stand and where God calls...
Across cultures, religions, and centuries, virginity has been elevated from a biological state to a moral category, transformed from a neutral fact about a person's experience into a marker of worth, honour, and social belonging. The preoccupation with virginity is not a moral or spiritual concern at its root, but a mechanism of social control—one that disproportionately burdens women, reinforces patriarchal power structures , and severs individuals from their own bodies and autonomy. Virginity: Control Dressed as Virtue The language surrounding virginity is invariably the language of value. Girls are told they are "pure," "precious," or "unspoiled"—and implicitly, that to lose virginity outside sanctioned contexts is to become contaminated, devalued, ruined. This framing reveals the ideological function virginity serves: it is moral currency, a commodity assigned to women's bodies by social and religious institutions that profit from it. This cur...