“This is our job—to create a moral framework we call the world to follow.”
Sarah Augustine minces no words in calling Christians in the west to renounce the Doctrine of Discovery, the set of 15th-century laws, legitimized by the Church, that declares “a land can be considered ‘empty,’ and therefore free for the taking, if inhabited by ‘heathens, pagans, and infidels’.” Indeed, the book is “a call to action,” lifestory.com declares, noting that it offers “a damning look at how the very humanity of Indigenous peoples has been overlooked and denied in the name of money and power.”
As Simon Fraser University explained when it had her speak this past May, Augustine “guide[s] us on a journey away from this Eurocentric worldview, and toward an Indigenous view of interdependency and a return to a planet that sustains all life.” She’d have us step out of “the comfort of white supremacy and dominant western culture,” Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary’s Grant Showalter-Swanson agrees, to be “in relationship and resistance with oppressed communities.” He says of Augustine, a Pueblo (Tewa) descendant, and a Mennonite: she “invites us to interrogate our theology, investments, mindsets…and challenges us to truly follow” the way of Jesus.
The Land is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery
By Sarah Augustine
Herald Press, 2021
