Churchhoney

In other words, the same thing that quickly clued Der into the fact that it'd be decades -- or never -- until his wife managed to complete the education required for the SBC to certify them as missionaries. But hey, Duggar parents and loyalists, your brand of education has nothing but GREAT consequences for those subjected to it.

But since she's pretty much NOTHING BUT a massive famewhore, this would be a problem for her. I've wondered what she'd get up to if she'd been born into a situation where there was no easy and obvious route to fame via her family connections..... I suppose it's possible she never would have developed famewhoremania if that were the case. But I can also imagine her doing far crazier stuff than what she does now if her relatives hadn't clambered onto TeeVee and she'd had to do all her famewhoring on her own steam.

This last statement about freedom is just a very shorthand version of some MacArthur always says. Suitable for a book written by his PR guy. Jingle may fully understand and believe his commentary or this -- or she may just be going along with it, as she was taught to go along with things. I think it's hard to say when one his people is her coauthor and her husband's entire life and career plan depends on sucking up to J M. A longer version of what this statement means in MacArthurland is here, not that it'll surprise anybody. This is one of his most common talking points. Very big on how good the good old days were, before there were any liberal churches (he is 83, after all).....and a lot of homophobia, of course. In short, people used to be kind and obedient to their parents and never never never homosexual. But now!! Nelly bar the door! .....I'm not entirely sure how hating homosexuals contributes to Jingle's newfound freedom, especially since she was supposed to hate homosexuals under the Gothard regime as well. But I think it's pretty clear that Jonny Mac has convinced her that it does. Not that we could expect anything else. If you go back three thousand years ago, you have a society of people doing exactly this, and it is the Israelites in the day of the Judges, and it says they wanted to do “whatever is right in our own eyes.” That, from the book of Judges. “We want to do whatever is right in our own eyes.” That’s the kind of time we live in today. Now, in order to do that, you have to make sure that you get the Bible out of the way because the Bible condemns much of what people want to do. So there has to be a denunciation of the Bible and the role that the Bible plays. You need to get the Bible out of the schools, you need to get the Bible out of the public discourse, because if people bring up the Bible, it’s going to encroach upon someone’s freedom, and if someone quotes the Bible, they’re going to be saying something that somebody doesn’t want to hear, and that in itself should be considered a crime. Laws are fast being installed that are leading to one goal: To make biblical Christianity a crime - to make biblical Christianity a crime, that’s what it is about, to silence the Word of God. The society wants to be free from any moral restraint. Now, let me tell you what this freedom is. It is not freedom. It is sin addiction. All human beings, apart from the gospel and salvation in Christ, are sin addicts. Everybody has his own assortment and concoction of drugs, but they’re all sin addicts. You can pick your poison, you can pick your sin, and you can even pick the level to which you escalate your sinful behavior, but you have to understand this, that the whole human race is made up of sin addicts. And if anything is true about them, it is this: They are not free. No one would look at a heroin addict and suggest that that person was free. We would suggest that that is probably the worst sort of temporal human bondage that someone could be in. Someone addicted to opioids or someone addicted to heroin or someone addicted to any other kind of behavior that is destructive, self-destructive, we would never see that as a kind of freedom. We would see it as a horrible bondage that needs to be broken. We need to look at the entire human race, not as people who are free but as people who are addicted to sin, and it’s an addiction they can’t break, and it’s killing them. And the death is not just physical, it is eternal. The whole human race is sin-sick and addicted to iniquity. In fact, Jesus says in John 8:34 - and here’s the sum of it: Everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin. Everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin, and everyone does commit sin; therefore, everyone is the slave of sin, everyone is an iniquity addict. Two verses later, in John 8:36, it says, “Only if Christ sets you free are you really free.” So what people in our society think is freedom is simply a more extreme, public, unrestrained manifestation of their addiction to iniquity. In fact, the Bible is so clear about this that it says there is no one who is good, all they are is evil, there’s no good thing in anyone, even that which we might see as righteous is filthy rags. Picture in your mind the worst scene of human drug addiction as it takes the victim near to death, and he sits in rags somewhere in a black alley, waiting to die and sticking the needle in again, and you have an illustration of what it is to be an unregenerate sinner. You can choose your drug, you can choose your sin, you can’t break your addiction. When Christ comes, He sets us free from that addiction to sin. In the past, in our culture, there were some sort of social restraints. There were some limits that society put on people. There were certain expectations. You go back a few decades and there was a kind of general sense of goodness, there was a general sense of the importance of family, for example. I don’t know if you know this, 26 out of 27 school shooters had no father. What’s the common denominator? There was a time when people had mothers and they had fathers and they had families and there was a sense of morality. And there were behaviors that had shame built into them, and you didn’t flaunt them, you hid them. All that is gone. There was a time when you could say there was a general goodness, there was a general kindness. In fact, there were literally millions of people who went to war for this country and other countries and died for the wellbeing of people they would never meet who hadn’t even been born. That was very sacrificial. But that was what people did in a nobler time. Now there’s a mad rush into every imaginable and unimaginable form of iniquity, and it’s flaunted. This has become a problem for the church because at the same time the world is running rapidly after this freedom, the church has decided it needs to be the friend of these sin-laden people. So there’s a move toward pragmatism. We want to be accepting of these people. We want to welcome these people. We want them to like us. In the liberal denominations, it’s, of course, reached almost virtually a terminal point where the true church is gone altogether, and the false church is now under the control of immoral ministers, homosexual bishops, lesbian pastors offering same-sex marriage, but even in the evangelical church where people say they believe the gospel, there’s a very, very carefully constructed method to try to win the world over, and that demands that we not confront their true condition. We can’t take their freedom. https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/48-30/understanding-christian-freedom

According to Jingle's 'gram, it's a sweet-potato base (similar color to refried beans, as you mentioned, except a little more yellowish, I guess) topped with sweet corn, spicy marinara and crumbled bacon...... (As a person who doesn't like sweet vegetables or sweet main courses, period, that sweet-potato base would be a deal-breaker for me.....But I guess I can see some people with different taste buds really fancying it .... I'd prefer the taco refried-bean approach myself )

I call it cultish in the sense that JM has his own very particular theology that he's basically made up out of whole cloth while intimidating people into accepting it by the claim that he got it directly out of the Hebrew and Greek of the Old and New Testaments.......And that he does really seem to insist that everybody buy his view in all its details.....And it also seems to me (and others! ) that he's clearly had some kind of cult of personality going in his institutions for many years. I agree with you that in many things Gothardism and some other famous cults are heavy on, like clothing people wear and such, JM's setup isn't very cultlike. And it certainly doesn't APPEAR cultlike at all, in those external matters. For me, however -- although not for everybody, I realize -- the essence of a cult lies in the cult-of-personality part and in any peculiar tenets of faith or theology that are of the mind-control or groupthink sort that the personality pushes above all else. And JM's worldview has quite a few of those, as I understand it!

Well, the book seems to have been ghostwritten by MacArthur's top PR ad communications guy. He's listed as the coauthor, I guess, but we know what that means. And its publisher has had numerous MacArthur books on their list for years. Plus, the publisher is completely tied in to Calvinism, especially MacArthur-style conservative evangelical Calvinism. So it seems likely they include it in most of not all of the books in their catalog. So it's hard to see that MacArthur's comms guy (and MacArthur and Jer) would intend the book to be anything but a strong (but well whitewashed, of course) sales pitch for MacArthur's opinions, his schools and his church. His church, like most others, is fighting for a strong well-funded future right now. And they'll get eyeballs on this book because of Jingle's tv exposure and public nostalgia and affection for her. And Jer obviously hopes to make that church or churches connected to it his livelihood. That suggests the motivations of all the men involved, at least, are the same motivations that David Waller (then a Gothard communications guy) and the Gothard enterprises and JB and M had for participating in a supposed book project about Jingle and her sisters that was actually just a disguised pro-Gothard tract. In a day of slowly dwindling church-cult influence and revenues, this is good PR for your enterprise that you can hide behind a TV-famous young woman. And can anybody imagine Jingle pushing her coauthor/ghostwriter to tell the story in some way she prefers or to leave out anything that the guy wants to put in? I can't imagine it, given what we've seen of Jingle all this time.... Plus everything I've read and heard about MacArthur says he's a "my way or the highway" kind of guy. In addition to being a guy who seems to have about zero respect for women, except insofar as they're "meek Christian wives" who follow the men's lead in every important area. So I can't really picture him losing this opportunity to hang a PR campaign for himself on Jingle's shoulders! He IS well known for whitewashing the degree to whish his enterprise is a cult.....So a lot of what he does and preaches WON"T be in the book. But the parts that people find enticing and palatable about his cult and his personal biblical views will be in there, I'm betting. In his mind, I'll bet the book isn't about Jingle at all, but about getting more butts (and wallets) into his pews. (in a sneaky, non-salesy way -- just make readers so curious about this wonderful new thing she's found that they'll want to know more)

Also, how misguided and hard up is someone who's trying to SELL this....and sell it via THIS "#ad" which...um....wtf? ....It's um, maybe an English-language primer workbook made in China....or somethings similar? Or just....wtf. This truly is something I can only imagine a person buying because they'd been madly in love with Jingle for well over a decade.... But since I'm sure there are a bunch of people like this, she'll probably spur some sales.....Some grandkids out there are going to get this trophy among their Christmas gifts.

If they're grapes (and I assume they are because there seem to be vines) then they're almost certainly Concord grapes. We had those in our yard when I was a kid, and my mother made the most astonishing pies out of them.....You had to get the skins off the grapes first, though. So even though I'd love to taste that pie again and I have the recipe, I've never felt energetic enough to do the prep work. I'd kinda like to see a Duggar cook try it, though. I might actually watch one of their videos if they did. 😁

He's been shown in meetings conducted by the church's major outreach program to local universities and colleges. He's also been photographed with men who are heavily involevd in that effort. And at least once it was mentioned somewhere that he was involved with it. THey have meetings all over the area at places convenient to where young people are, mostly colleges. They seem to send enough represenatatives to some places so the groups can meet on a really regular basis. All aimed at college age -- 18-24, basically. LIke this one, where Jer's sermonized. https://www.gracechurch.org/valley That marketing effort is absolutely crucial to the church's survival, let alone flourishing, as its skewed-elderly population dies off or can just no longer face driving the long distances most of them live from the church,. Plus, it seems to me Jer and ingle were recruited in large part to be part of that multi-pronged marketing program. It's the 20-somethings who'd be most attracted to young people's social media after all. So I'd expect Jer gets a nice solid stipend for his participation, since I'm sure all the staff involved get well paid. That's a do or die church project.

On the other hand, maybe she took a dozen photos and this is the one where he looked the best. ....I'd be happier with the revenge scenario. But I think it could go either way.

It's all about putting God first, I guess. That...and surreptitiously doing uber-crappy stuff to your children....with total deniability and the bonus of having your whole self-deluded community call you super-duper holy because of it.

The depressing thing is that for Duggars, those are exotic.

And considering that those numbers equal about two-tenths of a percent OR LESS of Jingle's follower numbers --- that seems pretty darned doable to me. A SMALL fraction of one percent! Surely she has at least that many followers who have some kind of big crush on her or who feel great nostalgia for her child self....or who are even haters of a kind who think, "This could be a hoot and 3 bucks a month is nothing, so what the hey!" ...and so on. The JVs really are getting MUCH better business advice lately. Ridiculous as it is that Jingle of all people can make a successful business out of being a seminar-leader/party-host/whatever. "Shy and retiring, not witty, not much of a talker and utterly uninformed" is usually a bad combination for activities like that. IT's a brave new world with social media in it.

I prefer to think of it as $36 a year. 😁 Seems to clarify that it's really a small-to-medium charity contribution. 🙃

airlift, children's hospital, IVs, c diff, CT scans.... Yeah. Snapshot material if I ever saw any.