Jeff Dietrich on Reluctant Resister Part 1
April 25, 2023. This week on Bibliocracy Radio I welcome a local hero and celebrate the 40th anniversary reprint edition of his landmark book of prison letters: Jeff Dietrich of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker. His Reluctant Resister, a classic of nonviolent resistance literature, is a defining example of the letters of a prisoner of conscience. Loyola Marymount Institute has just reissued the book. We talk, and he reads from it in the first of a two-part show. By turns thoughtful and humorous, the letters are a memoir, meditation, documentary account, and philosophical interrogation of the war machine and the carceral state by a person of faith who challenged authority, took its punishment but ultimately, won.
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