Deconstructing Methodist Mythology: The Search for a Usable Postcolonial Ethic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article offers a postcolonial and liberationist hermeneutic for reinterpreting and reassessing Wesleyan and Methodist history. It argues that much of Methodist and Wesleyan history has been shrouded in ‘Whiteness’; this term is concerned less with the epidermis of those racialized as ‘White’, and is more focused on systems, structures, policies, and procedures, all of which incorporate the totality of this phenomenon. As a cradle Methodist and a local preacher, I argue that for contemporary British Methodism to be a truly more radical, inclusive, and diverse ecclesial body, it will need to decolonize its history, rethinking how we see traditional, visible figures and consider the lack of agency of those condemned to the shadows. This work is not a revisionist ‘take down’ of John Wesley; rather, it is a postcolonial-inspired, Black theology hermeneutical reappraisal of our common history, seeking to give agency to often invisible Black voices.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".