Jose Carillo's Forum

TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR

This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.

The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here.

Joe Carillo

The making of a best-selling writer and the nature of religious belief

What does it take to become a best-selling novelist?

In “Boxers, Briefs and Books,” an essay he wrote as op-ed contributor of The New York Times for its September 5, 2010 issue, John Grisham, author of the best-selling legal thrillers The Pelican Brief and The Firm and the forthcoming The Confession, looks back to his personal odyssey from a succession of dead-end jobs as garden nursery assistant, plumbing assistant, highway asphalt crewman, and department store men’s underwear salesman to small-town tax lawyer and trial lawyer and state legislator until he finally stumbled on a most unlikely career—writing. He calls writing “still the most difficult job I’ve ever had — but it’s worth it.”

“I had never worked so hard in my life, nor imagined that writing could be such an effort,” Grisham recalls. “It was more difficult than laying asphalt, and at times more frustrating than selling underwear. But it paid off. Eventually, I was able to leave the law and quit politics.”

Read John Grisham’s “Boxers, Briefs and Books” in The New York Times now!

In “Mystery and Evidence,” Tim Crane, philosophy professor at the University of Cambridge and author of the books The Mechanical Mind (1995) and Elements of Mind (2001), thinks that it isn’t right for atheists to ask religious believers for evidence for their claims that God created the world and then reject these claims in the absence of such evidence.

Writing in the “The Stone,” the forum of The New York Times for contemporary philosophers on timely and timeless issues, Crane explains that while science is a very specific and technical kind of knowledge that requires patience, pedantry, a narrowing of focus, and considerable mathematical knowledge and ability, religious belief does not construct hypothesis for its claims but accepts mysteries as a consequence of what makes the world meaningful.

“Religious belief tolerates a high degree of mystery and ignorance in its understanding of the world,” Crane says. “When the devout pray, and their prayers are not answered, they do not take this as evidence which has to be weighed alongside all the other evidence that prayer is effective.”

Read Tim Crane’s “Mystery and Evidence” in The New York Times now!

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