None of the prominent liberation theologians influential in Latin America had significant training in or exposure to the discipline of economics, says Carroll Ríos de Rodríguez in this week’s Acton Commentary.

This was odd given that their concern for the material well-being demanded at least some attempt to provide an economic explanation of underdevelopment and mass poverty. Instead of engaging in such economic reflection, many liberation theologians effectively married their theology to various renderings of what was then the fashionable dependency theory, which holds that that resources flow from a “periphery” of poor and underdeveloped states to a “core” of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former.

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