Hope Dies Last
Jeff Dietrich embodies the vow of poverty. Since the early 1970s, he has been the driving force of the Catholic Worker organization here in Los Angeles. His work follows in the tradition of Catholic Worker founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin . Currently, he and his band of volunteers live in a communal house with homeless and terminally ill invited guests while running the Catholic Worker Hospitality Kitchen on Skid Row and participating in protests against a variety of sociological and political sins of the city, state, and country. He publishes a newspaper, The Catholic Agitator , and serves as both editor and columnist. His recent book, Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity, and the Poor on Los Angeles’Skid Row (Tsehai/Marymount Institute Press, 2011) collects forty years of The Catholic Agitator columns, letters, and journal entries composed by Dietrich. His book is equal parts memoir, political analysis, and scriptural teaching documenting Dietrich’s practice of pov