This Lent, the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) community invites you to a season of reflection, repentance, and action in conversation with the powerful book So We and Our Children May Live: Following Jesus in Confronting the Climate Crisis, by Sarah Augustine and Sheri Hostetler ’90.
In Lent, Christians journey with Christ in the wilderness, seeking renewal and restoration as we confront the forces of sin and death. This season, Augustine and Hostetler will challenge us to face the ecological and spiritual crises of our time—climate change, resource extraction, and the exploitation of Indigenous lands and peoples—and to ask ourselves: will we choose life for our children and the planet?
Through their writing, Augustine, a Pueblo (Tewa) descendant, and Hostetler, an Episcopal Divinity School graduate, offer stories of resistance and hope rooted in Indigenous leadership, faith, and justice. The authors co-founded the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery - an organization calling on the church to address the extinction, enslavement, and extraction done in the name of Christ on Indigenous lands. They also co-host the Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery podcast, where they call on Christians to join the movement for ecological justice, dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, and build a world where all creation can flourish.
Reading groups began on March 5. You are still welcome and encouraged to read the book on your own and join us for a public conversation with the authors on April 30th.
On April 30 from 3-4pm ET / 12-1pm PT, the EDS community will gather online for a public conversation with Sarah Augustine, Sheri Hostetler, and other leaders about how we can embody the commitment of choosing life for our children and the planet in our lives and communities.
Public Event Guests
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Sarah Augustine, who is a Pueblo (Tewa) descendant, is co-founder and executive director of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. She is also the co-founder of Suriname Indigenous Health Fund (SIHF), where she has advocated for vulnerable Indigenous Peoples since 2004. She has represented the interests of Indigenous community partners to their own governments, the Inter-American development bank, the United Nations, the Organization of American States Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and a host of other international actors including corporate interests. She has written for Sojourners, The Mennonite, Anabaptist Witness, Response Magazine and other publications. She is currently a columnist for Anabaptist World, and co-hosts the Doctrine of Discovery podcast with Sheri Hostetler. She and her daughter live in Tacoma, Washington.
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Sheri Hostetler ’90 cofounded the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery in 2014 with Sarah Augustine and continues to serve in leadership. She is the cohost of the Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery podcast with Sarah. She was also one of the founders of what is now called Inclusive Mennonite Pastors, a coalition of pastoral leaders seeking LGBTQ+ justice in the church. She has been the lead pastor of First Mennonite Church of San Francisco since 2000. Her writing has appeared in Anabaptist World, Mennonite Quarterly Review, Leader magazine, and more, and her poems appear in A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry. She is a graduate of Bluffton College and the Episcopal Divinity School. She is trained as a spiritual director and a permaculturist, and lives with her husband, Jerome Baggett, and their son, Patrick, on an island in the San Francisco Bay. She comes from a long line of Amish and Mennonite settler farmers.
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Mark Charles is passionate about creating common memory as he works to build a healthier national community, especially across racial lines. The son of an American woman (of Dutch heritage) and a Navajo man, Mark is a graduate of UCLA (B.A. History) who works as an author, speaker, podcaster, activist, preacher and consultant. He is one of the leading authorities on the 15th-century Doctrine of Discovery and in 2019 co-authored the award winning book Unsettling Truths - The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.
Mark co-founded a national conference for Native students called "Would Jesus Eat Frybread" and in 2012 he hosted, in front of the US Capitol, a public reading of the national "Apology to Native Peoples of the United States'' that the 112th Congress gave but then buried in the 2010 Department of Defense Appropriations Act. In 2020 Mark ran as an Independent candidate for President of the United States with a platform of building a nation where “we the people” actually means all the people.
Mark is a dual citizen of the United States and the Navajo Nation and works tirelessly to initiate a national dialogue on race, gender and class, a conversation he hopes will be on par with the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that took place in South Africa, Rwanda, and Canada.
Mark is currently writing his second book, Decolonizing Faith; his TEDx talk “The truth behind 'We the People' - the three most misunderstood words in US history” has over 300,000 views; and he has been featured on numerous media outlets including PBS NewsHour, CNN, Esquire, The Guardian, Voice of America, the Karen Hunter Show, Native News Online, Indian Country Today, and the recently released documentary Bad Indian: Hiding Out in Antelope Canyon.
Mark is a gifted communicator who loves a good cup of coffee and he regularly combines these passions as he interviews guests and shares his paradigm shifting perspectives on his podcast My Second Cup of Coffee.
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Patty Krawec (Anishinaabe/Ukrainian) is a founding director of the Nii’kinaaganaa Foundation and the author of Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future(2022) and Bad Indians Book Club: Reading At The Edge of a Thousand Worlds (2025). Her work centers on how Anishinaabe belonging and thought can inform faith and social justice practices and has also been published in Sojourners, Rampant Magazine, Midnight Sun, Yellowhead Institute, Indiginews, Religion News Service, and Broadview. She posts podcasts and essays with some regularity on her blog, thousandworlds.ca.