We were given or bought a copy of Oliver Jeffers wonderful children’s book, Lost and Found. Both the illustration and the story are wonderful and like many really good children’s books, the illustrations say and express so much that the words become full like balloons and it is easy to read these volumes over and over again, which is par and requisite for reading to children (and perhaps an interesting possibility for jaded, busy adults to look more deeply, to see anew, to look deeper…).

Today, I stumbled across a video interview with the Ireland-born Brooklyn artist himself and am now quite motivated to find more of his work.

This is a really wild stage concept and perfect for Amon Tobin, whose work I really enjoy as do all the people who worked on this project. This seems to be new territory for projection really, combining projection with an actual 3-dimensional structure. The results are pretty phenomenal and tailor-fit the music.

This looks like fun from two of my favorite artists…

Some things we should remember…wars, disasters, their causes and effects. The effect on the people who are in them. Perhaps we will think more then before acting, before speaking in a way that necessitates acting in a certain way.

Here is an interesting video and interview with photographer, Donald Weber, who has shot Chernobyl and recently Fukushima with a particularly acute eye for the story and atmosphere of an exclusion zone. Like he says, there’s no fixing a nuclear disaster…

This note speaks eloquently for itself, but I have omitted some names to protect the innocent (and perhaps the not so innocent).

To ______,

My wife ______ shared with me her e-mail correspondence with you regarding our concerns about our daughter’s recruitment into Young Life through the efforts of a volunteer at Eckstein.

After our daughter attended several meetings, my wife and I did some research into Young Life and talked with a family member who spent several years in the Young Life program. We are sufficiently alarmed by what we have found that we are not supporting our daughter’s continued participation and are further concerned that the school seems to endorse these efforts to promote what is basically a fundamentalist Christian doctrine.

Young Life volunteers like ______ are called “campaigners” their express purpose in working in middle schools and high schools is to recruit students to attend Young Life “Clubs”. They are instructed on strategies regarding which students to target and the purpose of the recruitment is to lead the new members to proclaim Jesus as their lord and savior. The mission is not one of faith through service, but is explicitly an evangelical mission of conversion to the Young Life-endorsed version of Christianity.

This is no different than inviting Jehovah’s Witnesses into the school, or a radical Imam for that matter. This is an organization that encourages its young followers to “rebuke” their own parents or outside friends if they are not willing to share the conversion experience. This exclusion extends to other Christian denominations which are not deemed sufficiently devout. This pressure is brought to bear gradually as students are brought deeper into the Young Life experience through their participation in week long camps. Their conversion experiences qualify them as campaigners like ______ and they are in turn sent out into their community schools to recruit the next round of students.

Please do some research about Young Life before so readily endorsing the “positive role model” they offer. I encourage you to do more than talk with ______ about her mission though it would be interesting to see if she would be candid about what her objectives are in “volunteering” at Eckstein.

Frankly if I wanted my daughter to be indoctrinated in a specific religious system, I would be sending her to a religious school not what I thought was a secular one.

Thank you for your attention,

—the father