Drawing out Stephen Bevans’s thesis that Christian theologizing has never been an
exclusively European project, this article proposes that theologians working within
the context of the United States turn their theological praxis to consideration of
persons in all our splendid, impoverished, joyous, sobering, and diverse humanity.
The article accords particular attention to cultural pluralism and interculturality along
with transdisciplinary methods of theologizing. Given the violent public activity of
white racist supremacist groups and individuals along with the barrage of racist verbal
assaults and tweets by high-ranking officials, theology’s active and public defense of
human persons has never been more necessary.

The African Jesus of Tinyiko Maluleke and the Christ of deep incarnation represent
two radically different christological trajectories. While the deep incarnation theologians
extend Jesus’s body into social and cosmic bodies, Maluleke locates Jesus’s body in the
bodies of his fellow Africans. Each of these christological moves is interpreted as a
manifestation, albeit in a different sense, of God’s radical embodiment through Jesus in
our world. African appropriations of Jesus stand out as a warning that even christologizing
centered upon the category of “flesh” is at risk of remaining purely visionary unless it is
done by and/or with those in whose own bodies Jesus is being crucified.