For 30 years Dennis Koehn has been a management consultant, working with corporations, government agencies and not-for-profit organizations. In recent years he has focused on executive coaching with business owners and CEOs. Raised in the Mennonite Church, Dennis is now a member of the First Unitarian Church of Chicago in the Hyde Park neighborhood. As a young man during the Vietnam War, Dennis spent 18 months in Federal Prison in Englewood, Colorado as a draft resister. Dennis has a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School and recently completed a PhD at the Chicago Theological Seminary, a program he began in his early 50’s. His dissertation, “Psychology, Theology, and Ideology Shape Decisions on War and Peace:  a Study of Billy Graham, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Vietnam War,” is the culmination of his decades long commitment to nonviolence and peacemaking.

Part I

Part II

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT MY INTERVIEW WITH DENNIS KOEHN by Cindy Kamp:

“Alternative service seemed to me to silence the critique of American foreign policy and I really wasn’t willing to be silenced.”  – Dennis Koehn

As an 18 year old, Dennis Koehn was tried in a federal court and sent to prison for refusing to serve in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. Most conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War took a different route, choosing alternative or community service. Dennis, however, wanted to make his opposition to the war clear, and believed that going to prison was the best way to do this.

In our interview he tells the story of how he decided to choose prison over community service during his senior year of high school. At the time, President Nixon was in the White House. The country had already had seen several years of war in Vietnam under President Johnson and it was clear to Dennis that the war was not serving any purpose. He also knew that he would be required to register for the draft.as soon as he turned 18. He admits that he was initially frightened by the prospect of a prison sentence. In order to prepare himself, Dennis participated in a weekly prison ministry sponsored by his church during his senior year of high school. This experience dissolved some of his fears, and left him better prepared for what was to come.

When Dennis turned 18, he wrote letters to the draft board, to President Nixon, and to his congressman, explaining that he didn’t agree with the selective service system which required all 18 year old males to make themselves available for military service. Already at this relatively young age, he believed in his ability to have a voice in foreign policy and took his responsibility as a US citizen seriously. In the tradition of Henry David Thoreau, author of Civil Disobedience, he believed that when a law is unjust, there is a moral imperative to break that law.

Dennis was arrested by the FBI during his first week of college. Following a series of hearings and legal procedures, he was put on trial a few months later. Ultimately, he was found guilty. While he had requested a 2 year adult sentence, the judge instead sentenced him as a youthful offender, which gave the government the right to hold him for 6 years but he was released after 18 months.

In reflecting on his time in prison, Dennis says that it was a tremendous learning experience and that he also “came to see it as a cross cultural experience.”  He met a broad cross section of people including African Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics. Back in the 1960’s, federal inmates were housed in large barracks rooms. Eating, sleeping, and working closely with so many other people gave him the opportunity to hear their stories. He learned first-hand that prisons are filled with the poor and the powerless, and he acquired an understanding of how lengthy sentences breed recidivism. He reflects, “America has created one of its most substantial crises by locking up so many people for so long.”

In his 20’s Dennis attended Harvard Divinity School and used the pastoral training he received there to work in the field of management consulting. When asked about values during our discussion, he says that empathy has been one of the most important in both his professional and personal life. Research has clearly established that empathy, or the ability to understand the experiences and ideas of others, is the key emotional competency of effective leaders in corporate America. It is also what allowed him to relate to his fellow prisoners as a young man serving time in federal prison.

Later in his life, Dennis became increasingly aware of the number of wars going on around the world and how opposing parties routinely claimed that ‘God is on our side.’ He typed a long list of questions about the role of religion in war and used it to frame the PhD degree he began in his mid-50’s. Again, his values have played a key role as he analyzes the role of religion in foreign policy. As he observes, the U.S. response to events such as September 11 have often been guided by fear. As a result, we face an enemy that we don’t know or understand. Dennis observes that if we were guided instead by empathy and a desire to understand the motivations of others, instead of fear, the American response to September 11 would have been different, and would not have left us mired in an ongoing war some fifteen years later.

DATE RECORDED:  2014

MUSIC: Thingamajig by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…)
Artist: http://audionautix.com/

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