ABSTRACT:
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.
Table of Contents
Biographical Sketches
Pt. 1 Introduction 1
Ch. 1 Introduction (Andreas Müller OFM, Arno Tausch, Paul M. Zulehner) 3
Pt. 2 Towards an Ecumenical View of Capitalism and the Religions 'of the Book' 27
Ch. 2 Judaism, Christianity and Islam: An Introductory Approach to their Real or Supposed Specificities by a Non-Theologian (Samir Amin) 29
Pt. 3 Formulating a Liberation Theology Agenda of the 1990s and Beyond 45
Ch. 3 Economics and Theology, Reflections on the Market, Globalization and the Kingdom of God (Jung Mo Sung) 47
Ch. 4 Saint Francis and Capitalist Modernity. A View from the South (Alberto da Silva Moreira) 61
Ch. 5 Feminism in the Country of Liberation Theology: Peru (Krystyna Tausch) 79
Ch. 6 Ethical, Biblical and Theological Aspects of Foreign Debt (Andreas Müller) 91
Ch. 7 Raul Prebisch's Contribution to a Humane World (Steffen Flechsig) 103
Pt. 4 The Lessons of 'Critical' Development Research and the Contemporary Capitalist World System 125
Ch. 8 Liberation Theology and the Social Sciences: Seven Hypotheses about The World Capitalist System in Our Age (Arno Tausch) 127
Ch. 9 Development in the Light of Recent Debates about Development Theory (S. Mansoob Murshed) 153
Ch. 10 New Forms of Dependence in the World System (Kunibert Raffer) 169
Pt. 5 The Challenges of Globalization and Transnational Integration 185
Ch. 11 Towards a Theology of the Democratization of Europe (Severin Renoldner) 187
Ch. 12 The Race to the Bottom (Robert J. Ross) 199
Ch. 13 New Departures. On the Social Positioning of the Christian Churches Before and After Communism in Central and Eastern Europe (Paul M. Zulehner) 215
Ch. 14 The Church of the Southern Andes in Peru: Its Commitment in Favor of the Poor (Luis Zambrano) 231
Statistical Appendix - Poverty, Dependency, Human Right Violations and Economic Growth in the World System 241
Resources for Further Studies 257
An Attempt at an Ecumenical and Cross Cultural Bibliography 259
Index
