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The Duggalos: Jinger and the Holy Goalie


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Closure Notice: This Thread is now closed due to the name (and much of the posting within it). Please be mindful going forward by naming topics in a way that invites a healthy community conversation. If you name something for a cheap laugh, this thread may be closed later because it encourages discrimination and harm. 

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10 minutes ago, BigBingerBro said:

Shouldn't he be a bit further along with the Hebrew by now?  Anyone know what the requirements are?

According to this, they take the basic Hebrew courses in the second year.....https://tms.edu/academics/degree-programs/master-of-divinity/

 

He is in the master of divinity program, right?

Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if he's in second-year classes now. He did attend their Texas distance-learning center to some extent -- but I don't think he ever said how many courses he took there or finished. Wouldn't be surprising if it was only a couple -- or not even that.....But there's no way he finished all the first-year courses while he was in Texas. So last year he would have been taking first-year courses or mostly first year and a few second-year ones. (they don't offer much at all in the summers -- so we're just talking fall through spring...)

On that web page they say flat out that the master of divinity is a four-year course. I don't think they said that earlier. Seems to me when I looked at it last year they called it a three-year course -- but also said that guys shouldn't worry if they were having trouble getting through it all in three years....Taking four years to do it was okay. (Hey, we get more money!) ....

So unless I'm misremembering, which is quite possible, it looks to me as if they've made an official change and it's a four-year degree now. ...

Guess Jer'll be living  in his free house in LA for quite a while yet.

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44 minutes ago, Sew Sumi said:

You mean that "temporary" house? Raise your hand if ever believed that pile of steaming crap.

it'll be amazing if the tiny bit of media and social-media exposure Jer seems to be giving these people turns out to be worth a free four-year graduate degree and a free, fairly large, pretty nice house in LA.  Seriously, WTF? 

He apparently has superhuman powers of sucking up. 

(The tuition isn't all that much, though. It's the house.....The tuition if you're on scholarship, which I'm sure he is, is only about $30,000 total for the degree. And that's spread over four years. So his campus job probably pays considerably more than that.... But the house... the house...) 

Edited by Churchhoney
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6 minutes ago, galaxychaser said:

I think it’s a cute post.

It is a cute post. I just wish Jeremy didn't post so much obviously staged crap so when he posts something like this it's believable. 

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2 minutes ago, Nysha said:

It is a cute post. I just wish Jeremy didn't post so much obviously staged crap so when he posts something like this it's believable. 

Exactly. 

The staged stuff is probably way easier, though, since it's not great! And since you just think of it and put together-- you don't have to keep your eyes open all the time and find it when it happens..... Plus, you probably feel chance is your enemy if you ever try to post a ton of stuff and have it all be real....

I suppose when you try to be an  influencer or social-media "personality," you feel pressured to put a lot of stuff up. And staged is just the simple way to do it........Unfortunately, it's not a very good way. 

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3 hours ago, Churchhoney said:

So unless I'm misremembering, which is quite possible, it looks to me as if they've made an official change and it's a four-year degree now. ...

Four years is a long time for a Masters Degree.

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17 minutes ago, Genevrier said:

Four years is a long time for a Masters Degree.

Indeed.  If accurate, this seems like a money grab.  This last spring one nephew finished his Master's a year after his undergrad and within weeks started his real job!  

In our church seminary work, it is four years of college undergrad with specific classes as prep to the ministry, two years of intensive seminary including clinicals within real congregations and a year as paid Vicar.  This includes training in ministering, counseling, teaching and preaching.   And.... a working knowledge of Greek and Latin are required prior to admission to the seminary.  

Not just four years of expository nonsense..  

  

Edited by fonfereksglen
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14 hours ago, Genevrier said:

Four years is a long time for a Masters Degree.

Sure is. 

Their Master of Theology is typically a two-year program -- a more typical length. 

What I notice about the list of courses in the Master of Divinity, though, is the broad range of things they include in that.

They teach them two ancient languages (Hebrew and Greek) from scratch. And then they're all required to go on to courses in which they read and translate those languages well enough (supposedly) to use their own translating skills to draw conclusions about the meaning of passages in both the Old Testament and the New Testaments. -- That's working toward a heckuva lot of language skill for people who started with zero knowledge of the languages in question. And this isn't a language master's degree. The languages are just one small aspect of it. (I doubt they get more than a handful of people to anything like the level they're talking about -- but each person takes enough courses to be moving in that direction.

Most U.S. seminaries have dropped the requirement for everybody to learn even one of the ancient languages, let alone both. It's an elective in most places. So by requiring that for everybody, they're setting a very high bar for those students. I don't think most U.S. students are very well prepared to learn ancient languages (or any languages) in depth these days. 

Then, while they have a lot of information and theory courses on things like biblical literature and theology, they also have skills courses in more than one skill -- the skill of preaching and and also the skills of pastoring and counseling from a pastoral perspective. That stuff all has practicum kind of stuff involved in it. 

And then I notice -- and I don't remember seeing this last year when I looked -- that they now also have a required first-year course called "Grammar, Research and Writing." From that, I conclude that all the students need some kinds of remedial work to even be able to begin these other studies. The "'grammar" part, for example, is probably vital for the language study. I can't speak to the Hebrew, but I've studied ancient Greek, and I know that you're really at sea learning that language if you don't have a strong background in grammar coming in. And these days, I'm sure they get a fair number of people who come in who haven't really internalized grammar concepts and terms, despite having taken English courses and a foreign language in high school and maybe even college. 

They are also offering these degrees to a lot of people who have no undergrad study of most of these subjects. i expect that if you come in as an undergrad religion major or something you're more likely to take their Master's of Theology degree......But look at Jer -- I would bet that he has absolutely no background in any of this subject matter. So he needs a combination of a bachelor's and a master's degree, I think. And, in fact, that's pretty much what he's getting here (if he does any homework, that is...) 

They try to cover a heckuva lot of material and skills. And a lot of it is hard stuff to learn. So the four years makes sense, I think. But I'm surprised that very many people can give all that time to it. 

 

Edited by Churchhoney
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It sounds like a Junior PHD lol. Poor Jere hopes nobody challenges his knowledge of Hebrew or Greek once he's done and just focuses on his spiffy attire. And his meek wife and cute children.

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15 minutes ago, BigBingerBro said:

It must be grueling for Jermy.  If only he had elective choices such as "Biblical Fashion: From Wool to Skins"  or "Who wore ir better? Mary of Nazareth or Mary of Magdelene?"

Blonde bimbos of the beatitudes.

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On 8/19/2020 at 12:46 PM, farmgal4 said:

It looks just like Felicity and nothing like Jinger.  It doesn’t favor her in the least, which makes it a waste of money IMO.

I agree. I actually think it looks like Lauren.

It's a nice painting, and she did a good job painting from a photo without a live model.

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Jeremy’s degree program seems long to me as well. I went to divinity school many years ago and the M.Div degree took 3 years, which included specific courses related to the student’s denomination (there were several denominational divinity schools/seminaries in the area where students could take those classes; my school was non-denominational). We had a language requirement, but you could choose from several languages, and not everyone who was planning to be a minister took Hebrew or Latin. Not all students had background in religion or theology; I was in the minority that did (I didn’t get a M.Div though, I was in the theological studies program.) 

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1 hour ago, MargeGunderson said:

Jeremy’s degree program seems long to me as well. I went to divinity school many years ago and the M.Div degree took 3 years, which included specific courses related to the student’s denomination (there were several denominational divinity schools/seminaries in the area where students could take those classes; my school was non-denominational). We had a language requirement, but you could choose from several languages, and not everyone who was planning to be a minister took Hebrew or Latin. Not all students had background in religion or theology; I was in the minority that did (I didn’t get a M.Div though, I was in the theological studies program.) 

Yeah, I think it's the requirement that they go pretty far with the two languages, Hebrew and Greek, that pushes it from three years to four .

Their stated intention is to teach them to a point where they can distinguish subtleties in both Greek and Hebrew biblical texts so they can use them to support theological points! I mean, there's no way they can actually do that for all but a tiny tiny handful of people. But for them to claim they're trying to educate all of them toward this goal, all the students have to take several classes in each language. ..... That's a lot of class hours eaten up by just this one requirement.

Jer's Hebrew workbook says he's in the very first class, since he's learning vowels. So that puts him at the beginning of second-year studies, in language at least. Even if he is farther ahead in some other areas because of courses he took through the Texas distance-learning center, he's got at least two and a half years of school left till the degree, and probably three.....or more, if his campus/affiliated-church? job takes up much time.....

I assume he'll stay for it all -- both because it must be heavily subsidized and because he clearly likes the idea of having this degree and sees it as prestigious....But that's a long time to pretend that your free house actually was intended to be yours for just a semester.....I don't see how they'll be able to afford a house on their own, though.

Wonder if he was really counting on getting his own TLC show once they got to LA and so he figured they'd be able to afford their own housing fairly quickly? That would explain his whole "we're the breakout stars" thing. He's been trying to make that true because he promised MacArthur and company that it would be -- so he could afford his own house and also have more opportunities to publicize the church and seminary, not just on social media but tv? 

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4+ years getting a worthless degree from a fake school, with the idea that it and Counting On will be a launching pad to fame and fortune as an evangelical preacher...this dream of Jeremy’s seems so delusional that I find it depressing, but...I don’t know that world, and I’ve been wrong before 🤷🏻‍♀️

Edited by rue721
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7 minutes ago, rue721 said:

4+ years getting a worthless degree from a fake school, with the idea that it and Counting On will be a launching pad to fame and fortune as an evangelical preacher...this dream of Jeremy’s seems so delusional that I find it depressing, but...I don’t know that world, and I’ve been wrong before 🤷🏻‍♀️

At least he seems to be paying his tuition with fake money, so there’s that.

My guess is at this point Jer’s life plan is down to, “MacArthur can’t live forever.” Although I suspect he’s not the only guy there with that same plan.

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14 hours ago, Churchhoney said:

They teach them two ancient languages (Hebrew and Greek) from scratch

Well, now I think four years isn’t enough. You’d have to study very hard, every minute, to achieve everything they say they require, and even then I don’t know how many people could do it. I wonder if this is really the expectation, or if this is just what they publish to impress other people. BTW according to Mr. Genévrier, who had a bar mitzvah in the distant past, Hebrew doesn’t even have vowels. There are just these vowel markers that are basically training wheels for beginners. (I don’t claim to understand anything about Hebrew myself, I’m just reporting what he said.)

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13 minutes ago, rue721 said:

4+ years getting a worthless degree from a fake school, with the idea that it and Counting On will be a launching pad to fame and fortune as an evangelical preacher...this dream of Jeremy’s seems so delusional that I find it depressing, but...I don’t know that world, and I’ve been wrong before 🤷🏻‍♀️

Yeah, Jer seems depressingly delusional to me, too. His fair-to-middling-at-best talent for preaching/pastoring and his fair-to-middling energy level aren't enough to propel him to the success levels he seems to want, seems to me.

Weird as it may be, this degree does seem to have been worthwhile for a lot of people. There are a fair number of thriving patriarchal Christianity types around the country and in various kinds of organizations who came through the seminary. Although I think most of the guys who make the most of it probably come in with more talent for preaching and/or pastoring than Jeremy has and almost certainly more work-type energy.

I could be completely wrong about this, but based on what I've read about Jer's soccer career, I have the impression he probably let it totally die before it needed to and that that happened partly because as soon as things stopped going his way he didn't put as much energy into it -- even though it seemed to be a big dream of his, too.....So he may have a pattern of wanting something but maybe not wanting it quite enough to do everything it takes....

I'm sure he didn't give the Laredo church his all -- even though it was a huge gift to him, falling into his lap because of his dad....And when you get a great stroke of good fortune like that, you ought to work 10 times as hard so you don't waste it. But he didn't appear to.... Of course, in Laredo he also seemed to prove he's not really wild about pastoring and not really good at preaching either.

I actually think the degree might be the best thing he has going for him, when it comes to his future. I don't think TLC will amount to much. He may think he and Jingle are breakout stars, but I have a hard time seeing the network building a show just around them (of course, who knows...).............MacArthur, however, has longstanding prestige in some circles. So unless the seminary's accreditation gets stripped sometime soon, the degree could be the thing that polishes up Jer's average talents and skills and make some church or organization happy to hire him. ...He seems to make a good first impression.

 

 

 

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6 minutes ago, Churchhoney said:

He seems to make a good first impression.

Back in my corporate days, we used to categorize those empty suit guys as, “he gives good Powerpoint.” I’m not sure RFP can even do that....or whatever the churchly equivalent might be.

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Just now, Oldernowiser said:

Back in my corporate days, we used to categorize those empty suit guys as, “he gives good Powerpoint.” I’m not sure RFP can even do that....or whatever the churchly equivalent might be.

Yeah, I expect his good impression comes before his very average Powerpoint.

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36 minutes ago, Genevrier said:

Well, now I think four years isn’t enough. You’d have to study very hard, every minute, to achieve everything they say they require, and even then I don’t know how many people could do it. I wonder if this is really the expectation, or if this is just what they publish to impress other people. BTW according to Mr. Genévrier, who had a bar mitzvah in the distant past, Hebrew doesn’t even have vowels. There are just these vowel markers that are basically training wheels for beginners. (I don’t claim to understand anything about Hebrew myself, I’m just reporting what he said.)

It does seem outrageously rigorous on the part of the school and overly ambitious on the part of the students.

And from what I seen, read and heard, which is minimal, about Fundy preachers, I'm unsure where much of what they're being taught would actually be used.

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9 minutes ago, GeeGolly said:

It does seem outrageously rigorous on the part of the school and overly ambitious on the part of the students.

Gonna suggest that they don’t have to learn, they just have to pass. I doubt they’re failing anyone because then they might leave and take their tuition payments with them.

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25 minutes ago, GeeGolly said:

It does seem outrageously rigorous on the part of the school and overly ambitious on the part of the students.

And from what I seen, read and heard, which is minimal, about Fundy preachers, I'm unsure where much of what they're being taught would actually be used.

Yeah. The rigor and ambition are the way MacArthur sets himself apart from a lot of other evangelical types and probably the way most students who enroll in his seminary do, too.

I think officially stretching this degree period to four years now is a tacit admission that it may be getting to be too much. So far, though, MacArthur's really really prided himself on requiring the ancient languages and so on when every other seminary was dropping that and other academic requirements. In addition to the extra time, they also -- I think quite recently -- added the required "grammar, research and writing" course for first years, which I'd call another acknowledgment that the academics are harder for the students these days. So Mac is trying to hold the line. Nevertheless, it seems pretty clear that even these students who deliberately chose his program have increasingly had trouble handling it, as other seminaries have found.

The thing about fundy preachers, though, is that these aren't strictly fundies. These are conservative evangelical Calvinists.....They absolutely do not call themselves fundies, nor are they called that by scholars of the field. The expectations for them in their churches -- at least historically -- are quite different from those in churches with the fundamentalist label. 

They absolutely consider themselves much more as an intellectually based group of Christians rather than a mainly heart-based group. They still have a lot of preachers/pastors who preach by explicating the bible verse by verse, including with translation in some cases. They talk theology in a way that you don't find at all among the people who are called fundies.

To some degree there's always been and still is a perceived class difference and economic difference. These people see themselves as the direct heirs to the New England Calvinists, a kind of rigorously moral and conservative Protestant elite ... It's all much more subdued and educated than fundies. And it's been increasingly popular among even some veering-toward-fundie Baptists, for example, with more Baptist seminary faculty embracing this kind of study than before and, shock, embracing Calvinism.

So while most Americans, including in their churches, seem to be moving away from any kind of bookish, "expository preaching" type stuff, it still does exist among people in these groups. I don't know how many of the young it appeals to -- but there are certainly some young "intellectual" type and hipster intellectual type Calvinists out there. (Ask @Zella !)   

So while the job market for people with Greek and Hebrew in their backgrounds certainly isn't what it once was, it definitely does still exist .... Of course, I expect it's a better market for people who are actually good at these things...

So Jer will need to polish up that first impression and learn to talk a good game about his seminary learning. Because I don't know how much of it he'll be able to actually demonstrate, given what we've heard of his sermonizing up to now.

12 minutes ago, Oldernowiser said:

Gonna suggest that they don’t have to learn, they just have to pass. I doubt they’re failing anyone because then they might leave and take their tuition payments with them.

Definitely......But I do think it's more than just the tuition. Much as I think MacArthur's a jerk, I do think he also genuinely thinks that the stuff he teaches is the stuff that ought to be taught. ....

So I think it's tuition plus a belief that if they put more people through these studies (at least minimally),  more will see the light and realize that Mac and others who share his views have been right all along.

And I do think that Jer, for example, yearns after this whole 'intellectual structure of the Reformation" thing or he wouldn't have all those busts of Reformation people in his office! .... Not that I think he seriously studies it. But I think he probably believes that he seriously studies it. ...

Edited by Churchhoney
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7 minutes ago, Churchhoney said:

So while most Americans, including in their churches, seem to be moving away from any kind of bookish, "expository preaching" type stuff, it still does exist among people in these groups. I don't know how many of the young it appeals to -- but there are certainly some young "intellectual" type and hipster intellectual type Calvinists out there. (Ask @Zella !)   

Yes when I was at COFO (which used to have a Presbyterian affiliation and still attracts a number of diehard Calvinists, quite a few of whom are from out of state), a good percentage of the philosophy and religion department were hipster Calvinists. They were insufferable. Like I cannot even adequately explain how awful and condescending they were. But they were extremely well read on theology and loved to debate arcane theological matters. Some of them started blogs that probably just had each other as followers where they talked for pages and pages about some obscure theological point. Lol

They prided themselves on their own understanding of being intellectual. A lot of them were in a formal logic class I took. That was wild. Not all of them were as smart or as articulate as they thought they were, but the idea of being intellectual and being an articulate, intelligent defender of the faith was extremely important to them. 

And it is one reason why I have such a hard time understanding Jeremy's social media persona. 

The guys I knew would probably be all over his fashion sense and even the gourmet food. They were all a bunch of coffee snobs too. But Jeremy's lightweightness when it comes to theological debate and his unwillingness to participate in it would make him seem like a coward and a mouth breather to them. 

They would be wanting to talk Calvin with him, and if he admitted he hadn't read Calvin or didn't have strong opinions, they would probably have rolled their eyes at him.

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Those expository type congregations don't expect interesting sermons in my experience.  MacArthur is dull as ditch water to watch and listen to.  I barely lasted without sleeping through his sermon when I went to the church to see if I could see Jeremy and Jinger.  The graduates of the seminary seem to find jobs relatively easily in southern California and are well sprinkled around the US.  

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1 hour ago, Oldernowiser said:

Gonna suggest that they don’t have to learn, they just have to pass. I doubt they’re failing anyone because then they might leave and take their tuition payments with them.

Yeah, that’s pretty much what I meant.

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1 hour ago, Churchhoney said:

Not that I think he seriously studies it. But I think he probably believes that he seriously studies it. ...

Bingo! That is exactly the impression I have formed about Jeremy. The one time I tried to listen to a sermon of his, it was about the evils of Catholicism. I felt that he had only ever studied Catholicism from the POV of fundies. I doubt he has ever read any analysis  Catholicism by a Catholic or even by a neutral scholar. And of course if you’ve only studied one side of something, you can’t  claim to have studied it seriously. Or, I guess you can claim anything you want, but it won’t be true.

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28 minutes ago, Oldernowiser said:

If Jesus does come back, I hope he’s going to kick their snotty little asses. “What part of ‘feed the poor, lift up the downtrodden, and comfort the sad‘ is so fucking hard to understand? Now get over yourselves, get out there, quit yapping and start serving.”

And they would richly deserve it! I think they all also missed all those Bible passages where they are warned about pride. 

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Hey people, not so fast with the judgement of ole Jere- he's trying to be relatable, and uh fun.

He's failing but he's trying. And he should just give up and try something else, like actually studying.

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4 hours ago, Chicklet said:

Hey people, not so fast with the judgement of ole Jere- he's trying to be relatable, and uh fun.

He's failing but he's trying. And he should just give up and try something else, like actually studying.

Yeah Jeremy's biggest problem is he has poisoned his own well. Honestly, before he was such an obvious attention whore on social media, I may have found that tweet mildly amusing. But he's so much pretentious crap in the past couple of years, it's impossible to read anything he posts without rolling my eyes hard. And I'm not sure how you recover from that from a PR perspective without just going away. 

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5 minutes ago, Chicklet said:

He is trying to appeal to too wide an audience. Either stay with the young religious demographics or try for the skateboarders.

You can't have it all Jere.

Yep. His marketing strategy seems to be some combo of "throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks" and "everything but the kitchen sink." 

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11 minutes ago, Oldernowiser said:

Sealing wax???? This just takes self-obsessed douchery to a whole other level.

I stared at that photo for the longest time, not realizing he was holding an envelope. I thought he drew the squiggly marks on the top of his pompous Boston wingtips shoes.

I cannot believe he uses sealing wax!  Or even writes real pen and the letters.

Edited by louannems
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On 8/22/2020 at 10:07 AM, Churchhoney said:

MacArthur, however, has longstanding prestige in some circles. So unless the seminary's accreditation gets stripped sometime soon, the degree could be the thing that polishes up Jer's average talents and skills and make some church or organization happy to hire him. ...He seems to make a good first impression.

The seminary's lack of accreditation shouldn't be an issue for any prospective church looking at Jeremy as a possible preacher. MacArthur is extremely well known and the seminary is considered a top Calvinist school. The majority of Calvinists, evangelicals, and fundies are going to believe that satan is behind all of these issues.  

As for Jeremy thinking that when MacArthur kicks the bucket he's going to be anywhere close to the line to take his place is hilarious. There are better men who have been hovering around him for decades waiting for him to die so they can take over his ministry. Jeremy is going to be shown the door when those who put their actual time and effort into it begin their death match.

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I don't have words for the sealing wax. Even the insufferable hipsters I know don't use sealing wax because it's like they instinctively know it is a pretentious bridge too far. Has someone hacked his account to write parody posts? 😂

Edited by Zella
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40 minutes ago, Nysha said:

 

As for Jeremy thinking that when MacArthur kicks the bucket he's going to be anywhere close to the line to take his place is hilarious. There are better men who have been hovering around him for decades waiting for him to die so they can take over his ministry. Jeremy is going to be shown the door when those who put their actual time and effort into it begin their death match.

Yeah, and I really don't think even Jer is arrogant and clueless enough to imagine he could leapfrog over what he must know is a whole bunch of people who've been thinking of themselves as potential successors for years......I do think he might look around over the next while to see if he could attach himself as an assistant or other type of hanger-on to one of the top candidates (in his judgment) in hopes of getting some kind of a job when the succession happens. But he's gotta know he doesn't have any chance at more than that. 

Edited by Churchhoney
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