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
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Not a Liberal
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Meal Update
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Thoughts From an
American Soldier
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Editor Daniel Schmidt
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"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