The Land Is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery

White settlers saw land for the taking. They failed to consider the perspective of the people already here.

In The Land Is Not Empty, author Sarah Augustine unpacks the harm of the Doctrine of Discovery—a set of laws rooted in the fifteenth century that gave Christian governments the moral and legal right to seize lands they “discovered” despite those lands already being populated by indigenous peoples. Legitimized by the church and justified by a misreading of Scripture, the Doctrine of Di...