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.

The anthropocentric orientation and treatments of evolution and ecology found in
Laudato Si’ undermine its potential for operationalizing its vision of “splendid universal
communion.” Jesuit astronomer William Stoeger’s conceptions of experience and
knowledge provide a resource for addressing these concerns and for fostering a
perceptual turn to the cosmos in theology. Comparisons with Lonergan and Rahner
illustrate the potential of Stoeger’s approach, and the Spiritual Exercises illustrate his
vision. The article concludes by considering the theological horizons of his approach.

This three-section article reappraises both Edward Schillebeeckx’s continuing
significance and the relationship between ecclesiology and political theology. Having
identified two differing sets of concerns within political theology, the first section
argues that the claim that the church is the true form of political theology needs to
be disciplined by a Schillebeeckx-like critical ecclesiology if it is to avoid ecclesiological
idealism. The second section argues that such transformative ecclesiology is itself an
act of intra-ecclesial political theology; and the third that it needs to be pursued with
greater political astuteness than Schillebeeckx manifested in his theology of ministry.