Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity, and the Poor on Los Angeles' Skid Row - Softcover

Jeff Dietrich

4.2

10 ratings by Goodreads

9780983961628: Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity, and the Poor on Los Angeles' Skid Row

Softcover

ISBN 10: 098396162X ISBN 13: 9780983961628

Publisher: Marymount Institute Press / Tsehai Publishers, 2011

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The essays that make up Broken and Shared were originally published bi-monthly over a forty year period in the newspaper of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, The Catholic Agitator. Collected together for the first time in this book, these essays constitute Jeff Dietrich s witness to poverty on Los Angeles Skid Row. The vast scope of Jeff Dietrich s essays introduces the reader to a world like no other. These essays combine the stories of poor women and men with a record of the author s civil disobedience, with a chronicle of the city s attitude of depraved indifference when it comes to the treatment of its poor, with a day-to-day history of the rapidly changing landscape that is downtown Los Angeles. The arguments and analyses in this book are predicated on singular and radical readings of the Biblical texts in counterpoint with a varied and rich array of philosophical, literary, and critical ideas. Through the lens of Jeff Dietrich s perspective and rooted in his life of self-imposed poverty, this book is both a prescription for change and an inspiration for how we might find ways to live more meaningful lives because we know the importance of caring for those who have nothing to offer but themselves.

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About the Author:

JEFF DIETRICH was born in Newport News, Virginia. When he was nine years old his parents moved to Southern California where he was raised and educated. A er college and in order to avoid the draft, he spent six months traveling in Europe and North Africa. For the last forty years, he has lived in community at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker in solidarity with the poor. Jeff Dietrich is an activist, whose numerous actions of civil disobedience have landed him in jail more than forty times; he is a cook and a kitchen worker, whose eforts have helped provide more than three million meals to the homeless on Los Angeles Skid Row; and he is a writer, whose eye-witness accounts of the suffering and deprivation of the poor are imbedded in his relentless and vehement exposure of the political and social system that helps to maintain their poverty.

Review:

This is the story of Jeff Dietrich s lifelong effort to unite the will of the spirit with the work of the flesh. This entire work is deeply compelling. Through his personal, spiritual evolution and commitment to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, he writes with self-deprecating humor and extraordinary insight, confronting his fears, and confirming his faith. --Martin Sheen, Actor and Activist

When Dan Berrigan eulogized Dorothy Day, he said, She lived as though the truth were true... and she put first things first. So, too, Jeff Dietrich, in this loving, prophetic challenge of a book. --Greg Boyle, S.J., Author of Tattoos on the Heart

What you are doing is something beautiful for God. --Mother Teresa, Noble Laureate and Humanitarian

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