You can spot the brute pretty easily. Strength mixed with anger. He works at looking tough, or being tough, as he calls it. A mouth let loose to insult people, and his excuse is that it is the courage of the prophets. He does not want to be a man without a chest, so he beats his chest like a brute to prove he has one.

For a long time now the culture has been at war with manhood. The plain things God built into a man, the drive to lead, to provide, to compete, to stand between danger and the people he loves, got lumped together under one word and called toxic. Strength became a threat to manage. Taking the lead became control waiting to happen. A boy who wanted to win, or to protect, or to be told he had what it takes, was handed a diagnosis when what he needed was a father. What God made and called good was renamed a sickness, and a whole generation of men learned to say sorry for the way God made them.

"It is not good that the man should be alone." God spoke these words in the garden, before He made Eve. They still stand (Genesis 2:18). We were made for one another. That is how God built us. Yet we live after the fall, in a world where real closeness often feels just out of reach. Ecclesiastes says it plainly. "Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up" (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10).

Loneliness is one of the wounds the fall left on us. It is the gap between the way God made us to live and the way we live now. The church is called to see that gap, to feel it, and to love the people who fall into it.

Few convictions run deeper in the pro-life movement than its care for the mother. It has built pregnancy centers, staffed the hotlines, and opened its homes, and it has insisted, rightly, that a woman in crisis is someone to be loved. That care shapes its laws as well, and in one particular place it shapes them in a way few in the movement have examined closely enough.

The movement holds two convictions about the mother, and it holds them both with a good conscience. The first is that a woman who ends the life of her child has murdered her child. The second is that a woman who conceives a child should carry that child to birth. Both flow from a single certainty, that the child is real and the child is hers. Take the first conviction at its word and a plain question follows. If a woman who aborts her child has in fact murdered her child, should she be treated as a murderer or not? The movement flinches from the question, and it has rarely stopped to ask why.

Of the seven deadly sins, sloth is the one we are surest we understand. We picture laziness, idleness, the avoidance of work. Yet that picture barely reaches the surface of what Scripture and the church fathers named. The sin they warned against runs deeper and lies closer to home than most of us suspect.