At a time of the profound crisis of the world capitalist system, a group of social scientists and theologians takes up anew the issue of liberation theology. Having arisen out of the struggle of the poor Churches in the world’s South, its pros and cons dominated the discourse of the Churches throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s. Then, dependency theory was considered to be the analytical tool at the basis of liberation theology. But the world economy – since the Fall of the Berlin Wall – has dramatically changed to become a truly globalized capitalist system in the 1990s. Even in their wildest imaginations, social scientists from the dependency tradition and theologians alike would not have predicted for example the elementary force of the Asian and the Russian crisis of today. The Walls have gone, but poverty and social polarization spread to the center countries. After having initially rejected Marxist ideology in many of the liberation theology documents, the Vatican and many other Christian Church institutions moved forward in the 1980s 1990s to strongly declare their “preferential option for the poor”. Now, the authors of this book, among them Samir Amin, one of the founders of the world system approach, take up the issues of this preferential option anew and arrive at an ecumenical vision of the dialogue between theology and world system theory at the turn of the new millenium.
