Word: jesuses
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...After all, Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, 61, who preached before several hundred followers and a clutch of more conventional Christian protesters at an Orlando-area amphitheater last weekend, would seem to be a true original. By his own account a former heroin addict and thief, he still imbibes hard liquor ("Jesus drank wine because he didn't have Dewar's," he told ABC's Primetime in March), surrounds himself with beautiful women despite being married, wears a $11,000 Rolex and drives a BMW, and says that for members of his Miami-based Creciendo en Gracia (Growing in Grace...
...Thus far, perhaps because he preaches in Spanish yet fits into neither of the two current major hispanic religious niches - Roman Catholic or evangelical Protestant - De Jesus has escaped a full-dress scholarly analysis. But experts are beginning to close in on him, even if they cannot accurately say how popular his idiosyncratic movement really is or predict any more than anyone else whether it will continue to grow...
...Jesus, says Anthony Stevens-Arroyo, religion professor emeritus at Brooklyn College and co-author with his wife of the book Recognizing the Latino Resurgence, is in some ways a familiar export from Puerto Rico, where he was born and lived until age 20. Stevens-Arroyo and some other scholars believe that the island's original colonial inheritance of Spanish Catholicism, combined with subsequent exposure to American Protestantism and its constitutionally mandated religious open market, created a a culture of religious seekers and corresponding "enthusiasms for overnight sensations." "This guy" says Stevens-Arroyo, "is one among Heinz's 57 varieties...
...Whereas La Diosa was something of an ascetic, however, scholars say that De Jesus's message is more typical of the branch of Pentecostal Christianity called Prosperity Gospel, which enjoys modest success here but is vastly popular in the developing world. De Jesus' literature is studded with recurrent use of the phrases "prosperidad," (prosperity), "felicidad" (happiness), and his movement's name, which means "Growing in Grace" in English. Such catchwords are reminiscent of Prosperity's assertion that God wants to showers gifts upon his followers - provided that they tithe liberally to their church. So is De Jesus' unabashed enjoyment...
...Still, his claim that his followers are incapable of sin because of a verse in Paul's biblical letter to the Roman church would stretch even Prosperity's sometimes liberal scriptural readings to the breaking point. And any prosperity church, indeed any Christian church, would regard de Jesus's claim to be THE Jesus as heretical. Almost as suspicious, says Miguel De La Torre, a professor at Denver's Iliff school of Theology and co-author of the introduction to the primer Latino Theology, is the way Creciendo's leader has run through self-descriptions over the decades: from...