In the film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s violent novel, Fight Club, character Tyler Durden points to his generation of young men as the “middle children of history.” Played by actor Brad Pitt, Durden represents the absolute collapse of masculinity into raw violence. This character joins his friends in seeking personal release and ecstasy through violent fights that send the participants regularly to the emergency room. In a haunting comment, Durden remarks: “We are a generation of men raised by women.” Is this our future?

Observing the landscape of America’s contentious debate over marriage, scholar Stanley Kurtz of the Hudson Institute, remarks, “It has become necessary to offer a case against polygamy.” That such a claim would appear so utterly reasonable in our times is a clear sign that marriage is in big trouble. That trouble is not, for the most part, localized on the issue of polygamy, but the question of polygamy hangs over current controversies concerning same-sex marriage and the legal status of marriage as a social institution. In today’s Commentary, Dr. Mohler considers Kurtz’s new article in the current edition of the Weekly Standard.

The U. S. Supreme Court is set to rule on the constitutionality of insanity-defense laws across the nation. The case, Clark v. Arizona, has to do with a defendant, Eric Michael Clark, who at age seventeen killed an Arizona police officer, supposedly thinking that he was shooting a space alien. Clark’s attorneys argue that they should have been allowed to enter into evidence proof that Clark had been insane at the time of the murder. Their argument for a constitutional right to an insanity defense will put the Court on the record on one of the law’s most controversial issues. Today, Dr. Albert Mohler goes on the record on the same issue.

On November 3, 1921, J. Gresham Machen presented an address entitled, “Liberalism or Christianity?” In that famous address, later expanded into the book, Christianity & Liberalism, Machen argued that evangelical Christianity and its liberal rival were, in effect, two very different religions. Howard P. Kainz, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Marquette University, offers a similar argument–warning that it is now modern secular liberalism which poses as the great rival to orthodox Christianity.

“There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens.” Zoologist Desmond Morris launched something of a revolution with those words and the book in which they are found, The Naked Ape. Today, Dr. Mohler makes the case that human beings are far from being just another animal.

The movie industry estimates that Ron Howard’s film adaptation of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code pulled in over 77 million dollars in its opening weekend. Despite dozens of critical reviews released last week, and despite well-documented and obvious flaws in the story’s logic and history, Americans saw the film in record-breaking numbers. Now why would so many persons be drawn to this story? Read Dr. Mohler’s answer in today’s commentary.

Since its release in 2003, forty million hardback copies of The Da Vinci Code have sold. Six million paperback copies also are now in circulation, and this weekend, a major Hollywood movie will be released. In both the book and the movie, the central character is one who does not actually appear in either, and that is Jesus Christ. Because of that, many of our friends and neighbors are going to be talking about who Jesus is and why He came. Many of our neighbors are going to be seeing, perhaps for the first time, an explanation about who Jesus is and why He matters, and our great concern is that the entire story presented in this movie is a lie.

“For the first time in its history, Western civilization is confronted with the need to define the meaning of the terms ‘marriage’ and ‘family.’” So states author Andreas J. Kostenberger who, with the assistance of David W. Jones has written God, Marriage, and Family: Rebuilding the Biblical Foundation. Read Dr. Mohler’s review and commentary on the book today.

Media critic Neal Gabler has suggested that popular entertainment is turning the nation into a giant transcontinental soap opera. Individual citizens are creating “life movies” starring themselves, and the entertainment industry has become “a force so overwhelming that it has finally metastasized into life.” Today, Dr. Albert Mohler argues that television, in its attempts to portray the margins of society as (almost) normal, is fueling a moral revolution.

Controversy over issues of contraception, birth control, and reproductive technologies continues to build, even as new technologies and issues quickly appear. Questions of human reproduction inevitably define what it means to be human, and the moral issues which arise in connection with sex and reproduction are among the most divisive controversies of our time. By request, here is Part Two of Dr. Mohler’s analysis of in vitro fertilization technologies [IVF], based in a Christian worldview framework.