"It seems real." Simply said.

A month ago I had a lunch time conversation with Christy, a thoughtful young student whose questions brought forth a common response from me, viz. "Have you read ... ?" We had been talking about her own academic interests "somewhere between politics, ethics, history, sociology, and theology" and I thought of Jean Bethke Elshtain, the University of Chicago professor who writes so widely and wisely about the world and our place in it.

She is a distinguished scholar who somehow remembers to remember that there is a True North Star, even as she engages in public square conversations about the meaning of our common life in settings as diverse as The New Republic and Books and Culture, and in her many very good books including Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life.

The day before semester's end I asked Christy what she thought of Elshtain's writing, as I had given her several books and essays following our lunch. I could see that she wanted to get it right, and yet with an honest eagerness she said, "It seems real." When I asked for more, she explained: "She writes about the real world, about the world I have seen and been so troubled by. Sometimes this semester I have despaired, wondering if the Christian faith can really speak to the complexity of the problems in our society ... but Elshtain's writing seems so real. She understands what she believes as a Christian, but more than that, what it means for the issues and ideas of our time. I need to read people like that."

I do too. The yearnings within me cry out for beliefs that are real. There is something about the refiner's fire-quality of that which is "real" that satisfies me in the deepest places.

I like real bread. At staff lunches my colleagues know we have to have "substantial" bread. If we don't I probably will just eat an apple. And I like to drink from real pottery. To avoid variations on the theme of plastic, and because I prize the craftsmanship, I have a small collection of wonderful cups and mugs. And if I have my druthers, I prefer to be around real people. This one is the most theologically complex" my wife Meg assures me! My own duplicity is hard enough to bear ... and I do need to bear it in others, and yet, it is always hard.

I like real music too. I like music that is "about the real world, about the world I have seen and been so troubled by." My tastes are very eclectic, ranging from Bach to Bob (Dylan, that is), and many in between. The only requirement is that the music reflect something of the truth and complexity of the reality of this now but not yet world.

And like Elshtain, I long for real politics.

But as I think about the political culture at the end of the century in America, I sigh. It seems so far away from what is real and true and right. In the moral life, those three are always held together, working upon each other back-and-forth, continually informing what we believe and how we behave both personally and publicly. Think it through for yourself.

In the chapter "Politics Without Cliché," she offers what she calls a "brief civic sermon" based on essays by Czech president Vaclav Havel. A playwright-become-prisoner-become-politician, he wisely writes, "Responsibility for and toward words is a task which is intrinsically ethical." In her "sermon," she argues that there is a deep relationship between the words we use to describe what we believe about the world, and how we live in the world. And she is profoundly right. Words are meant to nourish moral meaning in us as they speak truth to us. That is what God wanted for and in His world. It is one of the reasons that names mean so much in the biblical worldview. And yet, our experience is so often far, far from that.

Think of all the words we hear and hear and hear again — from pundits on TV and radio, to the pages of magazines, newspapers, and the Internet — until we are so full of them that we become numb to them. One of the great ironies of the modern world is that we have access to so much information, we can "know" so much, and yet, most of the time, the very volume, and the way it is communicated, tends to disconnect its meaning from us. "What does ... have to do with me?" is an all too common response.

The consequences for those engaged in the task of "accumulating knowledge" — students, for example — are especially destructive. Universities seem to ask us to know more and more about less and less, as the very condition for "getting on" into one's vocation and occupation. And what happens? Rather than nourishing deeper responsibility, specialization more often than not fosters the attitude, "That's beyond the scope of my studies." While an appropriate humility is always to be honored, this specialization-as-excuse for not caring about wider and deeper questions is socially and politically dangerous. Instead of more knowledge making us more responsible, as a society we are increasingly less interested than ever in what happens and what it means.

Just this week in The Washington Post, in the midst of massive amounts of information available on the impeachment of President Clinton, there is an article about "the group shrug" over his trial in the U.S. Senate. Interviewing folks throughout the Los Angeles area, including students at both UCLA and Pepperdine, they also ask several Rand Corp. "think tankers" about their interest in this once-in-a-century moment. A senior international policy analyst offers this: "Regardless of their view of the merits of the case, the hallmark of discussions I've had with friends about this is precisely this sense of numbness in society about the proceedings. This is a grave event that is going forward without much passion about it among the public."

Earlier in this decade, U2 had it right. As artists with God-given gifts to sense and feel what is going on in a particular historical moment, they often see the world with unusual clarity. That does not mean their visions are "right" philosophically and morally, but that what they see and hear going on as they artistically portray "the human condition" — the whys and whats of how humans understand themselves — is often "right on target;" for blessing and for curse.

And so U2's song "Numb," from their Zooropa album, catches something profound about the air we breathe as we live in the last years of the 20th-century in an increasingly self-absorbed, info-glut culture. In an almost levitical litany, Bono and band cry out, "Don't suggest ... don't connect ... don't try and make sense ..." and on and on and on. About half-way through the song, the lament, "I feel numb" begins and then becomes the dominant verbal vision for the rest of the song. In the MTV version, one of the band members, the Edge, stares out from the TV, all the while being distracted by every sort of taste and touch imaginable. And yet, he sustains his stare ... with the oddest kind of light flickering on and off his face throughout. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, it is clear that he is not staring at "us" but at a TV — and will not and cannot be drawn away from this weapon of mass distraction.

The oddness of our time and its dominant spirit is that our secular individualism — captured brilliantly in the "don't ... don't ... don't" of U2's song — has not produced a true humanism, a renewal of that which is deeply and authentically human. Rather it has given us an increasingly hollow life, both as individual persons and as a social/political culture. The word numb gets at it better than any other.

NUMBNUMBNUMBNUMB ... don't try and make sense ... I feel numb.

But lovers of God and His world cannot stand still, allowing this numbing down, which is in reality a dumbing down of moral responsibility, to be the last word. After her semester-long exposure to the realpolitik of Washington, DC, Christy found herself tempted to despair, "wondering if the Christian faith can really speak to the complexity of the problems in our society." I gave her Elshtain, as grist for her mill, knowing that there would be an intellectual richness that would feed both heart and mind. And by grace, she was nourished.

How are you doing with the big NUMB? Are you finding ways to respond responsibly? The weapons of mass distraction are all about us, and we must not be naive. If it were possible to speak to each of you, face to face, I would probably say something like this: Learn to learn in a more biblically faithful way. Commit yourself to make the most of your college years, allowing them to be a time for careful and critical thinking about the world and your place in it. Get off campus for a semester, and see something of the world around you. See if what you believe about the world can be lived within the world. Real-ly.

Elshtain quotes one of Havel's mentors, who wrote that "philosophy begins once life is no longer something that can be taken for granted." In my reading of this several months ago, I wrote in the margin: implications for students. The undergraduate years, as strenuous and stressful as they are, are still a passage between adolescence and adulthood; somehow neither one or the other, and yet stretched taut between. That's true for everybody.

There is much to work through in one's student years. Most of what we believe about the world is being decided upon during the years between 18 and 25. It is not that we are blank slates coming out of high school; rather it is that our convictions and commitments are largely subterranean, below the surface. The intense pushing and pulling of the college years, where we are beginning to own our ideas more personally than ever before, is a time for beliefs to emerge and to take on their own unique-to-us character. Whether we are conscious of this pilgrimage from parent's faith to personal faith, by the time we are out-of-school and into first jobs and families, the decision-making is mostly done.

Last week I got a letter from a former student, now studying in the Middle East. She was an unusually thoughtful young woman, even at 19 when she came to be a student at the American Studies Program on Capitol Hill a year-and-a-half ago. After seeing and hearing more of the world, she wrote: "I am having an amazing learning experience here, and am trying to apply what I am learning to the stuff that I learned at ASP. In that light I decided to read your book again. The first time I read it, I never really grasped the reason why hope is vital, as opposed to optimism. However, after going to Israel and Palestine ... I realized that any hope for the future has to be based on truth ... I am so thankful that I have come to see this for myself, and to really see 1) the power of a worldview which does not blink when faced with another closure on the West Bank, and 2) the power of hope. The people that I met who were possessors of hope, stood out far from those who did not. It was a wonderful testimony."

A testimony to what? To the reality of beliefs about what is real and true and right. She was beginning to see that "the Christian faith can really speak to the complexity of the problems in our society ..." Nothing is finally resolved; as the weeks and months go by the tensions between peoples in the Middle East seem even more intense. In many sad ways, it is still a mess.

And yet she wrote about hope and about its relation to truth. Because of the social and political conflict she was confronted by, she had to think through again the difference between hope and optimism. Is there really a difference, or is it just rhetoric? And all the while she was asking: "What do I believe? Is it true? What difference does it make, not only for my life but for the world around me?" She was no longer able to take "for granted" that her understanding of the world could make sense of what she was seeing and hearing. As she pondered, she came to believe that the biblical notions of hope and truth were for real, that real people in real situations can stand on those beliefs and that they make a real difference.

It is when the supports are gone, when the structures which have seemed so dependable are dissolving, that the perennially important questions become paramount and have to be answered. My journey among students over the years, especially students who are beginning to move out of college into the rest of life, is a 20 year-long confirmation of this reality.

Learning which is faithful to God, because it is learning to live in His world under His Word, is always and everywhere about working hard enough to understand that what we believe is all bound up with how we live.