America turns 250 this year, and we'll tell the old story again. But where does it actually start? Daniel Hawk traces our founding back past 1776 to the Doctrine of Discovery that gave Christian powers the right to seize "unclaimed" land, and to a reading of Genesis that turned wilderness into property and the people already here into obstacles. We talk about the myth of innocence: the belief that we are fundamentally good, that the brutal parts didn't happen or didn't count. It let us justify almost anything, and it left violence in our bones. We talk about how Scripture was used to take land and how it reads differently from underneath empire, about Canada and South Africa beginning to face their histories, and about what real repair asks of us - slow, relational, measured in generations. As we mark 250 years, this is an invitation to be honest about the first half of the story before we write the next.

L. Daniel Hawk (PhD, Emory University) is professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at Ashland Theological Seminary in Ashland, Ohio. Aspects of his work on biblical narrative take a postcolonial turn in books such as Joshua in 3-D: A Commentary on Biblical Conquest and Manifest Destiny and as coeditor of Evangelical Postcolonial Conversations.

Daniel's Book:

Undoing Manifest Destiny

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

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