34. Diana Oestreich
Today's episode is with peacemaker, author, speaker, and advocate Diana Oestreich and we discuss her book " Waging Peace" and why this book spoke to me. I select some of my favorite passages of her book that resonated with my experience and is the story of so many active duty and veterans across the world. We discuss how we met and what it's like leaving the wilderness and connecting with others who desire friendship and community. Diana shares what it means to love people and treat people like they actually matter. We delve into the military industrial complex, military culture, and the culture of fear. Diana and I talk about the importance of naming sexual assault, suicide, racism, and other issues we witnessed and/or experienced.
Diana Oestreich is a Combat Soldier turned Peacemaker. She heard God’s call to love her enemies in the most unlikely place: on the battlefield of the Iraq war. Diana is an Activist, Veteran, Sexual assault nurse, and relentless practitioner of Peace. Whether speaking across the country or in Iran and Iraq or at her son’s middle school in Minnesota she empowers us to identify political or religious divides to cross our own “enemy lines” in order to wage peace. Because Justice and Joy can’t wait. Diana is the founder of The Waging Peace Project, a movement activating everyday peacemakers to commit acts of courage for the sake of justice + joy, rooted in a relentless belief in the power of love to transform ourselves and the world around us. Her first book was Amazon’s #1 New Release in War and Peace. Waging Peace exposes the false divide between loving our country and living out our faith's call to love our enemies--whether we perceive our enemy as the neighbor with an opposing political viewpoint, the clerk wearing a head-covering, or the refugee from a war-torn country. By showing that us-versus-them is a false choice, this book will inspire each of us to choose love over fear. Diana, her partner Jake and their two sons, Bridger and Zelalem live along the shores of Gitche Gumme on unceded Ojibwe land. She is raising her Black son to know his worth and her white son to work for justice. They are an Ethiopian-American family woven together through adoption and a shared love for bad jokes and competitive card games.
Diana’s work has been featured on: Government for Grown Ups by Sharon McMahon, For the Love Podcast with Jen Hatmaker, Preemptive Love Coalition, Red Letter Christians, Red River radio, Duluth News tribune, Veterans for Peace, League of Women Voters, American Association of University Women, Duke Endowment, National Rural Assembly, Alworth Center for the study of Peace and Justice studies, Micah Synagogue, Forging Peace Conference, Womens Speakers Collective, Rural Women's Summit, Community College of Denver Military Sexual Trauma Panel and many podcasts across the land.