Pity the extreme Christian Right as it quakes at the thought that Democrats and Sen. Barack Obama could have sweeping victories next Tuesday.  Now James Dobson, founder and head of the Focus on the Family, has made a desperation move by releasing a letter of  fear and trembling this week.

 His despicable “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America” is a 16-page diatribe that pushes all the buttons that terrify hardcore conservatives: Gun ownership, prayer in schools, pornography, terrorism, contempt  for unions, media, taxes, liberal control of the U.S. Supreme Court, same-sex marriage, gays, public broadcasting, Democrats and more.  Obviously, he hopes that  the voters  take the time to study the picture he paints for four years hence, and that they will cast votes accordingly

It takes wading through. “This letter is not ‘preaching’ that all the imaginative future ‘events’named in this letter will happen,” Dobson writes. “But it is saying that each one of these changes could happen and also that each change would be the natural outcome of  a) published legal opinions by liberal judges; b) trends seen in states with liberal-dominated courts such as California and Massachusetts; c) recent promises, practices and legislative initiatives of the current liberal leadership of the Democratic Party and d) Senator Obama’s actions, voting record and public promises to the far-left groups that won the nomination for him.”

Dobson  writes only of the “significant implications for Christians.” Of course, he doesn’t care what happens to non-Christians. 

So what’s in his epic letter?  He starts out telling how both liberal and conservative justices – five in all — dropped off the Supreme Court because of health and age, all replaced by liberal judges so that 6-3 votes were common. The prospect for recovery from such liberalism, he moaned,  could be up to 30 years away because of the young justices named by Obama.  Dobson envisions same-sex marriage become federally protected by a Supreme Court  vote on Equal Protection.

He forewarns that elementary schools were compelling training on gender identity and “the goodness of homosexuality.”  So teachers “quit  by the thousands, no matter the personal cost.”  Dobson foresees radio and TV station censored for speaking out against homosexuality, that churches cannot bar gay couples from marriages on their campus or could not turn down gay job candidates for church jobs based on sexual orientation. The Dobson tripe continues when he foresees special bonuses for homosexuals joining the military to compensate for previous discrimination.

Dobson recklessly rambled on.  Public schools could no longer rent space for churches to use because of some strict interpretation of separation of church and state, all restraints on abortions were removed,  courts ruled that “any pornographic work has some measure of ‘serious artistic value” and gun ownership was limited to the military and police.

The Christian soothsayer just goes on and on in the language of a screaming demagogue.

Jim Wallis, well-known progressive conservative author of “God’s Politics,” the editor of Sojourners magazine and author of “The Great Awakening” calls it “an epistle of fear” for which Dobson owe an apology to America.  He said the fictional letter “crosses all lines of decent public discourse  and “shows the kind of  negative Christian leadership that has become so embarrassing to so many of your fellow Christians in America. We are weary of this kind of Christian leadership, and that is why so many are forsaking the Religious Right in this election.”

Wallis further tells Dobson, “The America you helped vote into power has lost its moral standing in the world, and even here at home. The America you told Christians to vote for in past elections is now an embarrassment to Christians around the globe, and to the children of your generation of evangelicals.”

Finally, Wallis labels the Dobson rant “the dying gasp of a discredited heterodoxy of conservative religion and conservative religion and conservative politics. But out of that death, a resurrection of biblical politics more faithful to the whole gospel–one that is truly good news–might indeed be coming to life.”

This should lead to a real backlash against Dobson and Focus on the Family.  Church-going people can expect a lot of crazy literature on their windshieds this weekend. Reasonable people will discard it

Tis the season for congregations to determine what they can afford next year. Much as money is the milk of politics, tithing and offerings keep churches, temples and fellowships operating and doing their work.

 The severe economic slump has gotten church leaders and boards to look seriously at budgets and plans as they gear up or complete fall stewardship campaigns. Not only do they have members whose own wealth and investments have had sharp losses of value, they have congregations where people have been put out of work, have had hours cut or are having to relocate to stay employed. With so many uncertainties in the roller-coaster economy, people of faith are coming to terms about how much faith they have in the economy and how God will see them, and their congregations, through it.

 Tom Breen of the Associated Press this week produced a story called “Churches are looking at hard times.” He talked to faith leaders around the nation to hear what they have to say in this traditional season of harvest. What he found were folks being practical and holding off on some projects, like the new $4 million building that the First Baptist Church in Weston, Fla., planned to erect. But weekly donations at the 2,500-member church have dropped from $40,000 to $36,000. “We want to continue to build, but we don’t want to jeopardize our church ministry,” said the senior pastor, Rob Peters.

 Breen writes that many churches are trimming budgets at the same time that the weak economy leaves more families coming to them for help with food, heating bills and gasoline. Churches, in some cases, are striving to maintain their Christian outreach and pulling back on physical improvements or adding staff. Davis Willis, the pastor of Stevens Creek Community Church in Augusta, Ga., said his congregation has a strong tradition of tithing, the biblical mandate to turn over at least 10 percent of personal income to the church for its work. “You would never know that things are taking a nosedive in terms of the economy,” Willis said. “It’s part of the DNA here, so we have seen some consistency even in rough times.

 At St. Timothy Lutheran Church in Charleston, W. Va., the Rev. Richard Mahan abandoned giving a sermon on forgiveness and, instead, he talked about the economy and how the faithful could cope with it. “Everybody’s facing hard times,” he told his flock. “If you are not, you’re going to.”

 Breen pointed to research from the Christian research group, Empty Tomb Inc., where six recessions since 1968 were examined for the impact on giving for faith communities. In three of those periods, giving went up, and in three, it went down. Another group, Giving USA Foundation looked at religion-related charitable giving in 11 recession years since 1968 and found tithing and diving were down in six of them.

 The stewardship director for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Ed Kruse, is calling on leaders of the 4.8 million denomination to focus on donating as a discipline. He cites Matthew 6:21: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be.”

Imagine, if you will, if a NIMBY – Not in My Back Yard  – attitude had existed when America was founded.  Thankfully, it wasn’t. And fortunately it took a long time before  homeowner associations were formed. And before zoning controls became so oppressive and limiting.

If you have followed any of my writings over the years, you’ll know of my distaste of HOAs and neighborhood self-righteousness.  I find it astonishing that “neighbors” somehow have so many rights.  Between pettiness and greed (ensuring optimum property values), these we-were-here-first folks seem to believe they should control the destiny over  everything that, as Sarah Palin might say, “we can see from our front porch.”  Often they talk nobly about freedoms but are intolerant when their neighbors begin to practice their freedoms.  There is such hypocrisy.

So I have been disappointed for Chandler and the area around Dobson Road and Galveston Street where the Sri Venkata Krishna congregation had sought to build a 7,500-square foot temple – an amazingly modest house of worship by any estimate. We have to wonder it it were a Baptist church, would there had been the objections?  Or is it, in fact, the fear of the unknown, or an unspoken prejudice that was driving the lawsuit that bars the Hindus from building.

Last month, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Glenn Davis ruled that deed restrictions for the Clemens Place subdivision “preclude the construction of the proposed center.”  Tribune writer Gary Grado noted, in an Oct. 17 story, that Davis turned down the case of the Sujnana Religious and Charitable Foundation, which bought the property in 2006.   Since that time, the Hindus have been holding religious activities in the house on the site. They had intended to put a temple there, and, in fact, the Chandler City Council had approved a special use permit for the place of worship to go up.

Then five homeowners in Clemens Place sued to stop it. They were successful.   The development goes back to 1975. Clemens attorney, J. Ernest Baird, has insisted the Hindus are violating deed restrictions from that far back that barred a house of worship there altogether.  So Baird argues the members should no longer be allowed to meet there.  But the Sujnana attorney, Troy Stratman, insisted original signers of the restrictions 33 years ago have mostly moved on, negating the restrictions on the land’s use. 

The Hindus have wanted to put up a temple that reflect a 12^th century Hindu temple in India.  It would have had a 40-foot tower, but the group volunteered to remove the tower from the plans and give it more of a contemporary look if it meant they could go forward with a building program.

Neighbors raised the usual hue and cry about unwanted traffic to the neighborhood — never mind that the Mormon church building across the street brings traffic to the ‘hood.  Or the post office, or the medical and office building across the street.  It is Dobson Road, after all.

Tuesday’s Tribune editorial said, “This reaction would appear to be a slight against Hindus as an alternative religion in the U.S., as it’s hard to imagine the neighbors would put the same effort into stomping out Bible study classes in someone’s home.”

Sadly what these few homeowners have achieved speaks poorly to progress made in cultural and religious pluralism in some communities. I covered much of this last year in a blog.

Houses of worship have always been sprinkled across American neighborhoods because they are where the people are.  They go together.

 Recently I got a voice-mail message on my wife’s cell-phone from Paul McDonald of Washburn, Iowa. It was Saturday afternoon, and the next morning the congregation of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church, located 25 yards from his home on First Street, would be celebrating their 50th anniversary.

 Paul wanted me to help him find where we had buried the time capsule from the 25th anniversary celebration at St. Pau’s. I called him back from Cracker Barrel restaurant and informed him it just had to be directly below the tall, white steel cross that juts out from the west side of the church’s sanctuary. It was sort of in the bushes when we buried it in the late summer of 1983.

 At the time, I had been the emcee for the silver anniversary celebration of the church. I had written the church’s history, 1958 to 1983, as a booklet. I got to be one of the first to peer into time capsule after we had dug it up and took the lid off. It had been buried years before. We all oohed and aahed when the lid was pulled off the capsule. Inside was lots of soggy papers. Still we were able to get a good idea of what had been put into the stainless steel container. I still have pictures of the glob of stuff.

 As I recall, everyone in the church had been encouraged to bring things they wanted to put, anew, into the capsule. My son, who was 8, put a Pac-Man ball and a Dukes of Hazzard car into the container. I only remember putting in a copy of the church’s history and an issue of the Waterloo Courier newspaper for that day. (At the time, I was state editor of that newspaper).

 Paul called me back later that Saturday to say he had poked down into the ground hoping to hit steel, but to no avail. I called my son, and he insisted that he stashed his items in that capsule and that he SAW it being buried. But it was 25 years ago. Certainly, there were no events between those times as a pretext to dig up the capsule.

 My mother-in-law, who still attends that church after nearly 40 years, called after the celebration to report a wonderful turnout of current and former members and friends. But there was no time capsule to open.

 I think it’s still buried there – like a kind of Treasure of Sierra Madre.

 I think the capsule is still somewhere in the black Iowa dirt in that unincorporated town outside of Waterloo under a bold steel cross that I painted white several times. Outside the church where I married my wife 35 years ago last summer are an assortment of the stuff of 1983. Perhaps, it will languish there another 25 years for the 75th anniversary in 2033. Then someone who was there in ’83 will poke around again for steel.

 I suspect that in many churches are cornerstones and time capsules with things that may be forgotten altogether. Or maybe some reluctance to smash up the masonry of a cornerstone to find out.

 At my own church in Tempe today, we have a time capsule buried below a sidewalk. I was there on May 7, 1989, when we dropped personal items and papers into it for the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1789. No telling when we’ll pull that cylinder from the ground. But we know where it is. Elsewhere on the grounds is a cornerstone from 1961 when the original building went up. Let’s see now. Fifty years later will be 2011.

 In 2002, on its golden anniversary, I had the honor to write most of the 273-page church history of the Tempe congregation – “Hand in Hand – 50 Years Together (1952-2002)” for University Presbyterian Church. It was an exercise that afforded me rich insights into the workings, challenges, personalities and rhythms of the congregation. Those are treasures of a congregations that can never be tucked away – and forgotten – in a sealed, steel drum.

You owe it to yourself to let your story be told and to share it with others. We, in the media, traditionally have been an important means for people to get their messages and stories out. But people don’t have to necessarily wait for someone to come along to help them do that.

 Generations that follow will include folks who care and will be fascinated to read your story. In another age, diaries left behind were one way to leave a legacy through personal thought. Today, with a computer and a trip to the neighborhood print shop, many people are now getting their stories out for families and friends and the generations to follow. Collections of stories can be as detailed and comprehensive as people choose. Otherwise, those rich powerful stories can go with them to their graves and be lost.

 Recently, I was given the chance to read a 50-page book, “Puerto Rican Goldilocks” by Marisel Herrera, which she put together in 2002. Today, the writer is Marisel Herrera-Anderson, program director in the Arizona State University College of Public Programs, in charge for the Nina Manson Pulliam Legacy Scholars.

 The self-published book gives intimate insight of a girl of Puerto Rican heritage growing up in a barrio of New York City. “I was profoundly impacted by the duality of my existence: a privileged public educational experience set against the backdrop of an ‘underprivileged’ minority childhood,” she writes. “The stress of poverty deeply affected my psyche – I grew up too fast, worrying about Mami and my seven siblings, worrying about basic things like food, rent and safety. I worried all the time.”

She tells of maneuvering two worlds – the classroom where she worked hard and was endeared by her teachers and “surviving the uncertainty and danger of ghetto life.” Herrera-Anderson made up her mind to not be a ghetto statistic. Her experiences taught her early “that the world made no sense. That injustice and privilege could reside side by side.”

In the book introduction, she would become fiercely proud of her heritage, “yet struggled with internalized racism and a cultural deficit model that faulted that very heritage with the failures and hopelessness of barrio life.” So much of the book is a collections of longings, unreached hopes and even a kind of guilt that a teacher would “caress me with her words” and not those named Carlos, Tyrone, Juan or Ana.. “Why couldn’t we all be Goldilocks or Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood or Prince Charming?,” she writes. “Why couldn’t we all sit on her fleshy lap or feel the security of her maternal bosom press on sides of our cheeks as she hugged us, the way I was allowed to?”

Herrera-Anderson devotes chapters to the barrio, school memories, her family and the “luchadoras” or survivors/fighters. She goes back and forth in English and Spanish, showing her two cultures through immediate translation. Under an essay called “Rosario,” or “Rosary,” she writes of the women who abidingly spend time around death beds and attend the rosary services. “They are the pillars of the community, each year rusting a little more with the weight of death worn like a shawl that keeps their old bones warm,” she writes.

What Herrera-Anderson has done is lay bare the “alma,” the Latin soul. She employs the expressiveness and vulnerability so common in Latin writings. In an essay, “If I Had Met You When I Was Five,” she talks of being the ideal student – “the one you could count on to do it right or to try her best, to go to the office or erase the board. I’d know when to laugh and when to quiet down.” The “magic would somehow make sense,” she notes.

“Yes, I wish I had met you teecha when I was five, for I would have kissed you and honored you in every way my little hurried heart and limbs could contrive,” she wrote. “Because then, my cupped hands would have been small, soft enough to carefully pour back into you the magic you offer me, the wonder that today fills so fully, so tenderly my insides.”

Her stories show how such nurture, encouragement and affirmation, at critical moments of childhood, help the human transcend the forces that could have kept one down. Herrera-Anderson’s commentaries preserve not only a personal glimpse of a childhood, but a brilliant analysis of how it shaped who she is today. In that exercise, she shows us the wealth that lies in our untold stories.

Saturday is the traditional St. Francis Feast Day that honors St. Francis of Assisi, the 13^th century Italian Catholic friar famous for his love of all the animals and critters in his world.  Catholics, Episcopalians and United Methodists most commonly hold “blessing of the animals” ceremonies on or around Oct. 4, near the date of his death, Oct. 3, 1226.

You have to love a press release that Pastor Stewart Lewis sent out from Velda Rose United Methodist Church, 5540 E. Main St., Mesa, to promote his plans for rite with the animals.  “Blessing to welcome ‘all crawlers,’” said the headline.

The event, he said, will bring “…animals from hamsters to horse for this once-a-year blessing.”

“Pastor Stewart welcomes anyone who would like to bring their wagging, squirming, wriggling, fluttering array of beloved creatures (two-legged, four-legged, no-legged, winged and finned ) for a blessing…,” the release said. 

“However, no blessing will be said for any critter that bites the pastor,” it adds.  Lewis adds some history: “While many believe the blessing of the animals began with Francis of Assisi, it turns that the origin of animal blessings has as many beginnings as a centipede has feet.”  He told how annually in downtown Los Angeles, people bring their pets to the church for a blessing not to honor Francis “but Antony of the Desert  … a third century hermit, who, it is said, lived among, and blessed, the wild beasts.”

The blessing will be 5 p.m. Saturday at the church courtyard. For more information, call the church (480) 832-2111. Similar blessings are planned at other churches this weekend.

They are always fun to attend to watch cats hiss at snakes and birds to shake off the water sprinkled on them. It’s always a kind of competition of who brings the most exotic creature and an adventure of who cleans up after the “accidents.”