On Echeverria’s ‘Redeeming Sex’, by Casey Chalk

By Casey Chalk, The Catholic Thing, July 30, 2025

Casey Chalk is the author of The Obscurity of Scripture and The Persecuted. He is a contributor for Crisis Magazine, The American Conservative, and New Oxford Review. He has degrees in history and teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College.

The gym is a near occasion of sexual temptation. At least mine is. Whenever I go, this husband and father of six, who is waging a losing battle against the notorious “dad bod,” has to navigate around scores of attractive twenty- and thirty-something females wearing clothes that in an earlier, more “prudish” age, would have been considered embarrassingly inappropriate for mixed settings. I just do my best to keep focused on the reps and reading my Magnificat between sets.

More recently though, I’ve been inclined to pray, both for the attractive, often near-perfectly fit women, as well as their confident and muscular male counterparts. For beneath all the nauseating, self-absorbed posturing of gym culture is, I think, a deep sadness. What, exactly, are we all doing there? For sure, “maximizing” our health, as it were (though I prefer to invert it and jokingly call it warding off death). Yet I doubt most young folk see it that way – death is far too distant for them. They are there, whether they admit it or not, because they want to be beautiful. But to what end? …

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