Humanity now stands before a great and unavoidable question — Do human beings face any natural limits?

Iran scored a huge publicity coup in the capture and release of 15 British sailors and Royal Marines in recent days. Iran has played this game before, and is likely to play it again. The tactic puts the nation directly into the headlines around the world — and that is the whole point.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad played the media like a musical instrument, greeting the captives just prior to their release. The Muslim world loved it. Tragically, the most damaging element of Ahmadinejad’s media triumph was handed to him by the Royal Navy in the person of Leading Seaman Faye Turney, the only woman among the captives and the mother of a 3-year-old daughter.
Her presence among the captives taken from the British patrol vessel gave Ahmadinejad the opportunity to make this observation:
“You will know that among the detainees there is one lady who is a mother of a child. Why is it that the most difficult work like patrolling at sea should be given to a woman?

“Why is there no respect for motherhood? Why does the West not value its women?”

Ahmadinejad’s questions still reverberate around the Muslim world. Nothing could more effectively demonstrate the immorality of Western values before Muslim eyes than this — a mother of a little girl sent as a warrior.

As Kathleen Parker remarked in The Washington Post:

On any given day, one isn’t likely to find common cause with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He’s a dangerous, lying, Holocaust- denying, Jew-hating cutthroat thug — not to put too fine a point on it.

Linda Hirshman, whose recent book suggesting that women should abandon motherhood for meaningful employment in the workplace caused such an uproar, is at it again. This time, she is aiming her guns at the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on homosexuality. Her outrage toward women who actually love being mothers is now matched by her argument that calling homosexuality immoral is patently ridiculous.

Beliefnet.com has published a debate of sorts on the “mommy wars.” Linda Hirshman, author of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, returns in a lengthy interview to her argument that women who stay home to care for children are “letting down the team.”

Are American evangelicals charting a new path into theological liberalism? That is the serious question posed by Wayne A. Grudem in Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism? This new book is one of the most urgently needed resources for evangelical Christianity, and it represents one of the most insightful and courageous theological works of our times. Read Dr. Mohler’s review of this important book.