Claire Blencowe is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. She works in social theory, history of ideas and participatory action research exploring intersections of racism, sexuality, culture and power. Her forthcoming book Spirits of Extraction: Settler Colonialism, Christianity and the Geology of Race revisits the troubling history of socially reformist, ostensibly anti-racist, Christianity and its role in the expansion of the extractive industries, British imperialism, and settler colonialism. The book explores key moments in the history of Methodism and the evangelical movement. Colonial fears, and the attempt to ‘civilise savages’, were crucial to the movement’s foundation in 18th century industrialising Bristol, England. Through the culture of the Cornish mining diaspora of the 19th century, Methodism enmeshed with all the complexity of race and labour-structures of the British empire. At the same time, in Anishinaabewaki/Upper Canda/Ontario, Methodist missionaries laid the foundation of abusive education and racialised ideas of redemption that both enable and sacralise the mining industry. Through these histories of our present, Claire Blencowe theorises the relation of religion and education to racism, modernity, biopower, extractivism, and the geology of race.