It's Wednesday, September 10, 2025.

I'm Albert Moller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

We believe the family to be part of creation order, part of God's design for creation. We don't believe that it is merely

a sociological development. But if you are assuming that the family or marriage is just a

sociological development, you have to ask the question, well, just how important might it be then?

It is very interesting to note that out in the

secular world, where you wouldn't have people who at least are going to talk openly

about God's intention for the family, nor the family being a part of creation order,

they're nonetheless coming to the rather unsurprising conclusion that the family is important,

and that family identity,

family thriving has everything to do, for example, with what children learn and how they learn in school and elsewhere, how they develop, especially in terms of resourcefulness and self-confidence

and self-discipline, the things that are necessary for functioning in the workforce. Just in recent days, a pair of economists wrote a piece for the

Wall Street Journal. Again, it's coming from economists. They know how to analyze these

kinds of statistics. They've come back to make the argument that when many people are

asserting, for example, that zip code of residents has a great deal to do

with whether or not the children in those zip codes succeed.

They come back to say, no, there's actually a more fundamental issue that has to do with sorting.

And that just means that in many communities the one thing that's most

important is not the zip code but the fact that there's a thriving family in the

home and especially the two-parent issue becomes very very clear the two

economists are James L. Heckman who by the way is a Nobel laureate and Sada

Ashania and the title of the article the the headline is, zip code is destiny.

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