Lenten purity: it isn’t what you were told

Lent begins today, a season in the Christian calendar dedicated to purification and to preparation for Easter. As one church describes the season on their website: “Year after year, the Church wisely offers a specific time for purifying our innermost desires.”

Because “purifying our innermost desires” sounds…vaguely sexual, it’s got me thinking about what purification means.

A few months ago, I ended a blog post by paraphrasing James 1:27. I wrote: “True Christianity, as [Jesus’s] brother wrote, is this: to care for those at the…