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.
