“Jesus gave me this platform to create and do good for this world.” That’s how Broncos starting left guard Dalton Risner responded to his team’s nomination for one of the most prestigious awards the National Football League hands out: The Walter Payton Man of the Year. Drafted by the Broncos four years ago, the 27-year-old Kansas State alum has started every game for Denver since arriving in the Mile High City. Risner is not just driven to be the best football player he can be, but to be a light in his community. Football is just the platform the young man uses to help people and introduce them to Christ in the process.

Despite the grueling demands of professional football, Risner finds the time to bless others through the Risner Up Foundation, a charity he created while still in college. Whether working with the Special Olympics, the Denver Rescue Mission, children in need, wildfire victim relief, or the more than 40 public appearances on behalf of those causes he made in 2022 alone, Risner is driven to give back and to make his savior, Jesus Christ, known far and wide.

His performance on and off the field prompted the Broncos organization to nominate Risner for the Walter Payton recognition. The award, named in honor of the great Chicago Hall-of-Fame running back, recognizes the best of the NFL’s commitment to philanthropy and community impact. Thirty-two players are selected as their team’s Man of the Year and become eligible to win the national award, which will be announced the Thursday before the upcoming Super Bowl.

Black Panther star Letitia Wright recently revealed in an interview that her life has been changed and transformed by Jesus Christ. Wright is best known for playing the role of Shuri in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Black Panther, and its recent sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In the film series, Shuri is the sister of King T’Challa, played by actor Chadwick Boseman who died in 2020 after battling colon cancer. Wright has had a highly successful acting career. She’s starred in the television series Top Boy, Coming Up, Humans, Doctor Who and Black Mirror – for which she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award.

However, all that glitters isn’t gold. On the inside, Wright was struggling. She suffered from deep depression and was considering quitting her career. She told The Guardian that she “partied and drank and tried to obliterate herself in work, but none of it helped.”

Then, one of her friends – actor Malachi Kirby – called her and told her that God had told him to reach out. Kirby invited her along to a Bible study, where “her life was transformed. Her depression lifted, and her career soared.”

“It gave me the centering I needed, the good foundation I needed,” she told The Guardian. “It helped me to put into perspective what was important for me. Chasing something that is not tangible or not wholesome is not the way I want to go. If I was to pack all this up I’d still be happy with my faith, the contentment I feel and the connection to God.”

It is often claimed that the home is the most dangerous place for women and children. But this is usually cited by family revisionists who advocate for all alternative family forms other than married-for-life mother and father raising their own biological or adoptive children. Their partisans in the mainstream media are all too happy to parrot these statements, leading to the seemingly unquestionable conclusion that marriage is actually harmful to women and children. But is this really true?

No, it is not.

Decades of very strong and sophisticated sociological and medical research has consistently shown that marriage is actually a very positive dynamic in protecting women and children from all forms of domestic violence. This is demonstrated everyway we know how to analyze the data.

A married man with a ring on his finger is dramatically less likely to abuse his wife and children compared to men who are simply drop-by boyfriends or live-in partners. Few life factors make as much protective difference here for women and children as marital status. Brad Wilcox, a leading sociologist from the University of Virginia, pointed this out some years ago in the pages of The Washington Post. He explained,

“The bottom line is this: Married women are notably safer than their unmarried peers, and girls raised in a home with their married father are markedly less likely to be abused or assaulted than children living without their own father.”