This is Rusty Reno at the editor's desk here at First Things magazine for the next installment of the editor's desk.

And I'm very pleased to have with me today, Kevin DeYoung, senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church,

an associate professor of systematic theology

at Reform Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. And Kevin is going to talk about

his essay in the November issue of First Things, The Case for Kids. Welcome to the podcast.

Great to be here. It's wonderful to have the opportunity to talk,

and thanks for the opportunity to write the essay. One thing that you lay out in this essay is

the stunning reversal of what I guess we'd call sort of the biblical hope for children.

Not just the West, but really all throughout the world, there seems to be the opposite hope.

Yeah, the biblical assumption, and it's so much an assumption it doesn't even need to be argued for in the Bible,

is that children are a great blessing, and it's the paradigmitic cry of affliction throughout both

Testaments, when someone, when a woman is barren, when someone cannot conceive, and you think of,

and I talk about this in the piece, but you think of Rachel's famous cry, give me a child

lest I die.

That's how much they wanted children.

And to see that stunning reversal, and you can look at it with total fertility

rates, and the science behind that is not perfect, but it certainly gives a clear picture that

in the West, America, Europe, but also the Far East, really everywhere in the world,

fertility rates are plummeting. And even in those places

where they're still well above replacement rate, which is largely sub-Saharan Africa,

they're falling. But in particular, Europe, West, we might even say the places that once were

considered Christendom are drastically, dreadfully below the

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