Her name is Mary Thornton, and she’s from Marianna. For foster kids like Billy Riggs, she’s “Mama.”

Thornton, 67, has been a foster parent for 32 years. She specializes in teenagers, three of whom live with her now, and many of them considered to have challenging behaviors. Her first placement, she said, was “terrible. I almost gave her back.” 

But she has persevered, the result being many lives changed. 

“I had one, she went to the Army,” she said in an interview. “Still in the Army. I have one that was an RN. Some of them do good, and some of them don’t. But basically, I had more to achieve than I had to not achieve.”

Thornton is the Department of Human Services (DHS) Foster Family of the Year. She and nine other families from across the state – two of them single foster mothers like her – were honored May 14 at a Foster Family of the Year Gala at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.  Continue reading →

By Steve Brawner, © 2025 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

This year’s commemoration of the attack on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu on Dec. 7 was missing one irreplaceable element: Pearl Harbor survivors. 

As reported by the Associated Press in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, none of the 12 living survivors, all now past 100 years old, were able to make the trip. It was the first time no survivors were present to mark the attack other than 2020 during COVID.

The news was another reminder that the World War II generation is now all but gone.  Continue reading →

By Steve Brawner, © 2025 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Dylan and Lauran McMahan of Hot Springs weren’t looking for an alternative to the typical American culture in which they were living. But they found it. And when they saw it, as McMahan said, they couldn’t “unsee it.” 

That’s when they moved the family to Homestead Heritage, a Christian community near Waco, Texas, that emphasizes faith, personal relationships, and a simple, agrarian lifestyle.

At Homestead Heritage, members believe their church should be a body of people connected to every facet of life – not merely a place where a person attends services on Sunday morning. While Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, members at Homestead are making what they call their own “exodus” away from modern America’s secular, fragmented culture, where rugged individualism and competition have left people isolated and lonely. 

“I mean, even the word ‘church’ means ‘called out ones,’” McMahan said. “So we’re called out of one community and culture into another community and culture, and that should be the community of Christ.” Continue reading →