Chastity: it is one of those unabasheldy churchy words. It is one of the words the church uses to call Christians to do something hard, something unpopular. It is a word that can set out teeth on edge, and it is the topic of this small book.

Chastity is one of the many Christian practices that are at odds with the dictates of our surrounding, secular culture. It challenges the movies we watch, the magazines we read, the songs we listen to. It runs counter to the way many of our non-Christian friends organize their lives. It strikes most secular folks as curious (at best), strange, backwards, repressed.

Chastity is also something that many of us Christians have to learn. I had to learn chastity because I became a Christian as an adult, after my sexual expectations and mores were already partly formed. But even many folks who grow up in good Christian homes, attending good Christian schools, and hanging out with good Christian friends - even these Christians-from-the-cradle often need to learn chastity, because unchaste assumptions govern so much of the contemporary society.

I am not an expert on chastity. I am not a theologian or a member of the clergy. I'm just a fellow pilgrim. What follow in this book is no more and no less than one person's reflections on the process of learning to practice chastity. I don't offer instructions or hard-and-fast rules. Instead, I offer a flawed example, a few suggestions, some thoughts about what works and what doesn't work, and the occasional reminder of why, as Chrsitians, we should care about chasitity in the first place.