It's Tuesday, August 29, 2023.

I'm Albert Moeller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from

a Christian world view.

Sometimes something appears in our national conversation and Christians just have the

instinct that we have to think differently about this than the rest of the world thinks.

Sometimes this kind of issue erupts on the front pages of a major newspaper, sometimes

you hear it in a conversation in the grocery store.

These kinds of issues can emerge in different contexts, but yesterday it exploded on the

front page of the Wall Street Journal.

What's important about this story is not so much what's in it, but what isn't in it.

The headline simply declares something that most human beings, throughout most of human

history, wouldn't have understood, quote, a sperm donor's quest to see kids.

The subject of the article man chases a role in the lives of the 96 children he fathered.

Before we go any further, just look at what we face here.

We're facing it a man who is described in this article as the father of 96 children.

But by definition, the oddity in the story is that he knows any of them because he is

identified in the headline as a sperm donor, which means he has commodified what God has

given us in creation to be fulfilled in the context of marriage.

He has made it into a commodity sold as a commercial product.

And yet there's a lot more to this story than a commercial product.

There's a lot more to this story than a financial transaction.

And what you see in the story is a longing that only Christianity can explain in the Christian

...