Musician Chris Beland of Bend, Oregon learns that he shares more with his Facebook friend and the front man from the Flying Burrito Brothers than just a love of music… In a hallway outside an auditorium that serves as home to Antioch Church in Bend, Oregon, Chris Beland Chabot presses his spine...

Daddy was the first dead person I ever saw. A child never forgets that image of their father in uniform, dead in a shiny metal casket. I remember the bloat in his face, the result of dying in jungle heat. That swollen face made Daddy look like somebody else’s father. My daddy wasn’t a fat man. There...

Upon my waking this was the dream: - We were in a room with a youth group of some sort. High school, college. Maybe 50-75 in numbers. One gal was speaking. It was not someone I recognized. She had an eraser in her hand and she was speaking about the power of prayer. To prove her point about how effective...

(Editor’s note:  Because we Burnsiders are such fun-loving, spontaneous people, we sometimes don’t run our articles in a time-sensitive fashion.  But it just so happens that Karen Spears Zacharias’ Memorial Day piece also reads like a Father’s Day tribute.) There are two places...

Isn’t that the age we live in  – that we want to see people who have it all, lose it all? That’s the question Lady Gaga posed to Anderson Cooper in her 12 minutes of 60 minutes fame. It’s a worthy question, if you accept the premise that the Lady has it all. Gaga is, by her own admission,...

I wanted them to cancel church. I am not saying I wanted them to close the doors. That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about forgetting the music and sermon they spent the week planning. I wanted Pastor to call us together as a body and say, “You know what? We aren’t going to do any of the stuff...

Best Buy, Kirklands and Alaska Airlines all made the nice list, but Nordstrom, Macys and Barnes & Noble had better watch out — they’ve been tagged on the naughty side of Christmas. But don’t blame Santa, he’s not the one keeping this list of who’s been naughty and who’s...

Joel Osteen better pay attention before he ends up in the same ugly mess as the Reverend Robert H. Schuller. Schuller might soon be yanking a foreclosure notice from the doors of his Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. The empire created by the 84-year-old Reverend has filed for bankruptcy....

I couldn’t tell if he was making a confession or if he was bragging. The man looked up from the computer screen from where he was surfing the net and announced very matter-of-factly, “I manage this bookstore but I don’t read.” Why would you tell that to an author? I try my best to be gracious...

I have a confession to make  — I’m a Brownie drop-out. It’s true. Not one of my more shining moments of life, it ranks right up there with the time I got caught stealing blue eye-shadow from the local five-and-dime. Blue eye-shadow. It’s humiliating to admit that I’m a quitter but that’s...