The essays that make up Broken and Shared were originally published bi-monthly over a forty year period in the newspaper 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.

List of Illustrations 
Forward by Martin Sheen 
Preface “Where The Spirit Dares” by Daniel Berrigan, SJ 
Author’s Acknowledgements 
Acknowledgements
Introduction by Theresia de Vroom

Prologue: Forever Young: Forty years as a Catholic Worker 

PART ONE

1. Faith as Story and Community 
2. Introduction 
3. Letters from County Jail 
4. The Lepers on Crocker Street 
5. Sundance and All the Indian Raiders 
6. No Resurrection Without the Poor 
7. Wrestling and Reconciling 
8. Power of Suicide at the Heart of the World 
9. The Devil’s Pact 

PART TWO: Food and Salvation 

1. Exorcising Jesus 
2. Can’t Get No Satisfaction: The Political Economy of Empire and the Beheading of John the Baptist 
3. Bread for Ducks but No Bread for the Poor 
4. Please Save Our Soup Kitchen 
5. Demonic Transubstantiation 
6. Planting the Seed
7. Creative Cooking 
8. Eating the Forbidden Fruit: The Problem of Industrial Agriculture 90 Exorcising the Demonic Food of Warmaking 
9. Recovering Radical Memory 
10. Christmas Appeal: The Poor Are Still with Us 

PART THREE: The Church

1. Introduction 
2. A Vision of the Church as Mother of the Poor 
3. The Church Sex Scandal: Three-quarters of a Billion Dollar Settlement 
4. The Great Cathedral Caper 
5. The Silence of the Patriarchs from A to Z 
6. The Power of the Cross: The Glory of the Mountain Top 
7. Their Story Seemed like Nonsense: Women in the Gospel of Luke 
8. Not by Bread Alone nor by Money and Ego 
9. Dorothy Day and the Church 

PART FOUR: Making Peace 

1. My Crisis with the Draft 
2. The Roots of Terrorism 
3. No Blood for Oil 
4. Redeeming the Soul of America: Voices from Exile
5. Getting Your Day in Court to be Among the Criminals 
6. Reflections on September 11: We Are Still Pacifists 
7. Military Success Justifies War in the New American Century 
8. Catholic Workers are Still in Jail: We are Still Standing with the Victims 
9. Jesus Wept 
10. Middle East, War, Nukes, and Apocalypse 
11. The Moral Captivity of Obama 
12. Osama bin Laden: The Wicked Witch is Dead 

PART FIVE: Resistance to Empire

1. Introduction 
2. Divine Intervention 
3. Casting Out Demons in Iraq 
4. Defeating Empire with an Army of Dog Lappers 
5. Torture: Exposing the Lie 
6. Critiquing the Imperial Papacy 

PART SIX: Technology and Alienation 

1. Not by the Power of Demons 
2. Doctrine of the Common Good as Gift Relationship 
3. A Theology of Non-Power 

PART SEVEN: The World We Have Lost 

1. The Fall into Civilization 
2. Anti-Christian Family Values 
3. Burdening the Poor 
4. Not One Stone upon Another
5. Wilderness Economics 

PART EIGHT: Image Over Substance

1. Notes on Consumerism 
2. Reagan’s America 
3. Jesus Christ, Silver Surfer or Suffering Servant 
4. Signs and Simulations 
5. Sacrificing the Innocent 
6. Propaganda: The Death of Democracy 
7. Rejecting the Temptation to Tall Towers 
8. Blind to Our Sin of Usury 

PART NINE: Compassion as an Act of Seeing

1. Introduction 
2. May the Angels Guide You to Heaven 
3. My Continuing Education 
4. I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning 
5. The Homeless and Hopeless 
6. Prophetic Hospitality 
7. Appropriate Medicine 
8. The Skid Row Death Row Connection 
9. Compassionate Response to Suffering
10. Every Simple Thing 

PART TEN: Abandoning the Poor

1. Hurricane Katrina Reveals a Nation in Which the Poor Are Abandoned 
2. Renaissance or Resurrection 
3. The Story of Jacob and the Homeless with a Stone for a Pillow 
4. The Shopping Cart Campaign 
5. The Universe Bends Towards Justice 
6. Declaring a Cease-Fire in the Drug War 
7. The Soloist: Fiddling while Los Angeles Burns 

Epilogue 
The Catholic Worker 
Chronology 
Bibliography 
Index 

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

"The world looks brighter for rarities like Jeff Dietrich."
––Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate and President’s Marymount Professor in Residence, Loyola Marymount University

"Jeff’s life-giving text held me enchanted, page after page, hours on end. I was at the mercy of a magister…a verbal magician, who is also, gift beyond price, a friend."
––Daniel Berrigan, S.J., Activist and Poet

"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

"For readers of the Agitator you have saved all the best and most challenging pieces over the years. For the uninitiated future readers of the Agitator, this is a one of a kind primer on the life of this courageous man, his community, and the newspaper he forged."
––Joanne Kennedy, Managing Editor, “The Catholic Worker”

"Jeff Dietrich’s work is both authentic and important."
––Jacques Ellul, Philosopher and Theologian

"Who are you, Jeff Dietrich? Wise guy, holy man, Dorothy Day fan, draft resister, genius editor, potato slicer, fund raiser, stargazer, word blazer, street smarty at a mystic party, who writes in and out of jail, never fail, for forty years with mindboggling compassion for the people of the streets."
––James W. Douglass, Catholic Worker, and Author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters

"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

"You and the LA Catholic Worker bring light in this dark time for justice and peace."
––Rabbi Leonard L. Beerman, Founder of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles

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. After 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 efforts 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.