Dynamite - Alliance Catholic Worker Newsletter Summer 2014

DYNAMITE Alliance Catholic Worker - Joshua Casteel House Summer 2014 Joshua Casteel’s ‘Returns’ Oscar Romero Inside: ! Joshua Casteel, the Catholic conscientious objector we named our house after, was also a playwright. His play ‘Returns’ was recently featured at a local theater. Aims and Purposes ! Not a Liberal ! Meal Update ! Thoughts From an American Soldier Volunteers   Needed    ! The   Alliance   Catholic   Worker    is   looking   for   full-time    community   members   and    volunteers.   Also    organizations   or   businesses    who   can   donate   their   time    or   services. Editor Daniel Schmidt 330-915-7061! www.alliancecatholicworker.org! [email protected] "You never really come back. It comes back with you.Who you seen.Who seen you. It's the things you can't quite see though that return the worst. Because you never really return to who you were.” – Spoken by one of the characters in Joshua Casteel’s ‘Returns’ During his lifetime, Joshua Casteel noted that his nonlinear, oneact drama Returns is about “the violation of youth - much more than it is about interrogation, torture, or the Iraq War.” Returns artfully places center-stage the painful confusion, intrusive hauntings, endless questioning, and desperate pangs and prayers of the souls of its combatant characters - but it also, and most certainly, drags into the stark spotlight the both the horrors the interrogation booths and the awful realities of the combat zones of Iraq. Joshua often decried the chasm that exists between combat veterans and civilians in this country, often calling into question the sequestering of combat veterans into isolation or and insulated caste whether that segregation be seemingly chosen or in reality more forced. Theologian and VA medical doctor Warren Kinghorn charges that “many of the things which our culture does ostensibly to support combat vets are, in the end, ways of not listening to them.” …Continues page 3