At least that is how the students visiting Washington, D.C., described the problem as they tried to make sense of the senselessness of the Columbine High School massacre. In a discussion with reporters at the National Press Club this past week, they offered the explanation that it is the availability of "too much information" that lay behind the horror of students choosing to murder other students in Littleton, CO.

Maybe you wonder along with me: Is it really possible to have too much information? Anyway, too much information about what? Nazis? Guns? Bombs? Athletes? Ethnic minorities? Christians?

I do think the students are onto something in their analysis of this cultural moment, and yet I am not sure they have got it quite right.

On-the-spot commentary after on-the-spot commentary, story upon story, tear after tear — what do we do, in our frail little bodies, with the onslaught of information? If it is the terror in Littleton one day, the day before it was the terror in Kosovo. If it was high school students being murdered one day, it was Albanian physicians being murdered the day before. If it was Littleton and Kosovo this month, then it was the Sudan last month. It strains our humanness to keep up with the amount of sadness and sorrow that there is to hear and see with the advent of modern technologies like the TV and the Internet. And after awhile, most of us shut down the barometers of our hearts, saying to ourselves and to anyone who wants to listen: I cannot care anymore.

Numb is the word for this kind of response. And it is not so strange that it is the word which we have heard again and again over the last couple weeks, reading and listening to the many different accounts of the horror in Colorado. From banner headlines to descriptions of individual students, we keep hearing numb. One father of a student who was in the library-become-death chamber, put it like this: "Aaron has been acting numb since the massacre. He's just not the same as he was before the shooting." Numb. Numb. Numb. It is not just Aaron, for all of the terrible reasons he has to be; in awful ways, we all are.

As I have noted in earlier columns, it is possible — maybe even probable — that exposure to the brokenness of life at the end of the 20th-century makes us prone to a unusual kind of numbness.

But too much information ... and a massacre in a Colorado high school? Is there any connection that can be meaningfully made? Is an honest conversation about ideas and issues that are horrific a possibility?

Ironically, the words of the students eerily echo those of James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who earlier this spring was quoted in a front page article in The Washington Post, lamenting that America has become "the too much information culture." It is an awesome charge, as it at one and the same time probes the most amazing and alarming aspects of contemporary culture.

Billington administers the largest library in the world. With its three massive buildings on Capitol Hill — the Jefferson, the Adams, and the Madison — it is an incredible setting for U.S. citizens to dig into their cultural sources. Books, magazines, journals, maps, music, films — it is all there. And yet Billington wonders aloud, in a forum in which the whole nation can hear: "We have access to unprecedented amounts of information, but are we becoming any wiser?" Calling it "The Tower of Babel syndrome," he asks: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? Our society is basically motion without memory, which of course, is one of the clinical definitions of insanity."

More pointedly, he focuses his criticism on the "audiovisual culture" with its explosive growth through the Internet, which by its very nature "shortens attention spans ... a person might surf the Web for hours and not encounter anything written before 1995." With a final punch, he puts it like this: "It's inherently destructive of memory. You think you're getting lots more [information] until you've found out you've made a bargain with the Devil. You've slowly mutated, and have become an extension of the machine."

Billington's question is particularly poignant, coming from the Library of Congress. The entrance to its huge holdings has these words written in stone, inviting, challenging, perhaps even warning those who enter: Knowledge is power. And yet, and yet ... there is something missing in that calculation, viz. much information does not lead, in and of itself, to much wisdom. Even its chief librarian knows that.

If that moral logic is flawed, then where does wisdom come from? What does "knowledge" mean, if not "power"? This is a critical question of huge consequence for students, especially for Christian students. In the next few essays in this column I want to take up the notion of knowing, exploring what it means for people who understand the richness of St. Augustine's insight. The question "What do you love?" matters much more than the question, "What do you believe?" in attempting to truthfully assess someone's goodness. He offers a perspective on knowledge that is deeply biblical, and which is light years from the foolish assertion that the modern world offers to us, that information equals knowledge equals wisdom.

Among the Littleton tragedy's lessons is this: Classroom conversations and Internet access on their own do not lead to the good life and to a good society. Knowledge, apart from a morally meaningful context, leads to the abuse of power, anywhere and everywhere. It is possible to be brilliant and bad. From beginning to end the 20th-century is full of figures that remind us of that reality. As the wise and perceptive novelist Walker Percy continues to warn us, human beings can "get all A's and flunk life."

So where do Christian students go to understand understanding, to know what knowing means? If we can agree that the "too much information culture" is sometimes a curse, then how do we still live in our culture — really live in it — and yet not be of it. That is the call of the gospel of the kingdom. Our convictions don't lead us to be against technology, even with its multifarious blessings and curses; they do call us to be in the world for the world, to leaven life in its most personal disciplines on through to its most public duties — all in the name of Jesus.

In my devotional readings over the last several months I have been meditating on N.T. Wright's Reflecting the Glory, in which he maintains that it is Jesus who gives us our principal model for living in the world. Day after day the evangelical Oxford theologian and now Westminster Cathedral canon calls me to the vocation of Jesus. Learn from Jesus, apprentice yourself to Jesus. Live in the world for the world, like he did. Wright's reflections are a constant reminder that we are to see and hear the world as Jesus does, "with the joy and the sorrow woven into the pattern of our days." I need theological reflection done like that, as it nourishes within me the spiritual skill to take up life in the world — without falling into a cheap happiness or a cheap nihilism.

It is God Himself then who models for us what it means to know in a deeply biblical way. From Genesis on, God reveals Himself as the one whose knowledge of makes Him responsible to which leads Him to care for. Listening to the biblical text it is that progression which is sustained time and again. God knows. God is then responsible. God therefore cares. So when God knows, He cares. The care is built into the knowledge, intrinsically. Why? For this profound reason: the biblical understanding of knowing is one which always assumes a relationship between the knower and the known. Whether that knowing is between God and humans, humans and humans, or humans and the rest of creation, the act of knowing in and of itself has care written into it.

The Bible is full of this picture, from creation to Revelation. One of the thousand windows into God's knowing comes in the gospel of Luke, just after Jesus has told the crowd following him that there will be a cost to their discipleship (Luke 14:25ff). The next chapter begins with the words, "Now the tax collectors and 'sinners' were all gathering around to hear him. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, 'This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.'" Jesus goes on to tell the well-known stories of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost sons. At the heart of each tale is God himself, seeing and hearing the fallen world around Him, and choosing to care for it. Most poignantly this is told in the parable of the prodigal sons, in which God is the longing, waiting father who, knowing His sons in all their sin, embraces them with His love. The incarnate God knows, and His knowledge leads Him to care.

I remember talking with a large group of student affairs staff at a California university in the fall. Over the three hours we talked about all sorts of concerns related to students. I had not come in with a planned presentation; they had each read my book, were using it with students in their residence halls who were interested in working at the connection between a coherent worldview and a coherent way of life, and so they simply wanted to talk for a bit. I enjoyed the interaction very much, moving as it did from questions about sex and studies ... to sex and studies. But that was okay, as I have lived my life among students, and know that it is in those two areas especially that one's beliefs and convictions about what is real and true and right are most clearly seen. I was not conscious of doing so, but when it was all over and I was walking across campus with one of the staff, she said, "You know, I was pleased but surprised that you kept coming back to Jesus. Every time we asked you a question, you asked us to think about Jesus. That's kind of different."

I suppose so. But the longer I live the more sure I am that it is Jesus, God incarnate, who models for us the meaning of human integrity. And so to know how to respond to the stresses and strains of life — even those covered in conversations about students and sex and studies — it is Jesus who offers us the deepest insight about what it means to live in the world, but not be of it. As the Creator of the cosmos, Jesus understood the difference and the difference it makes, when someone knows in a way that leads to responsibility and when someone knows in a way that leads to irresponsibility. Mark Schwehn writes in his eloquent and important book on contemporary higher education, Exiles From Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation, "Ways of knowing are not morally neutral; they are morally directive" — always and everywhere, for every teacher and for every student.

Jesus lived his life among people plagued by a "too much information culture." I don't mean for a moment to trivialize the Littleton tragedy or Billington's insightful critique of our culture. Both need to be faced head-on, by us. But at the same time we are historically naive to think that there are brand new problems and completely new questions. Our moment in history is unique; industrialization, specialization,and pluralization are each dynamics that shape our culture and world in ways that require a response. And yet ... the Smashing Pumpkins in all their late-20th-century love of melancholy and sadness have nothing on the writer of Ecclesiastes. Or St. Augustine as an adolescent. Read the Confessions. The perennial questions are perennial for that very reason; they keep coming up, generation after generation.

There was no issue that Jesus dealt with more than He did the problem of people who were sure they knew everything there was to be known, and yet in reality were profoundly and morally ignorant. His most searing criticism was for those who were the most-informed and best-educated; not because learning is itself unspiritual, but because their way of knowing had directed them away from a love of God and a love of neighbor. What are Jesus' conversations about, on every page of the Gospels, if not that? God knows and he cares. He wants the same for us and from us.

To know in this way is costly. It led Jesus to the cross. To imitate him in any serious way will undoubtedly cost anyone who tries. But that connecting of what we believe with how we live, our knowing with our doing, is at the very heart of discipleship in any time and any place.

What will it mean for you, as you take up the challenge of living in, really, really in, but not of the "too much information culture"? What ways of knowing can you nurture, as you walk along with friends who are committed to the same kind of serious discipleship, that will enable you to see and hear the world as Jesus does? What can you do to grow in your understanding of a truly and deeply biblical way of knowing, one that integrally connects knowledge with responsibility with care? The questions you ask in class and on papers are one way to get at this. The way in which you form friendships, including opposite sex ones, is another way of linking what you know with what you do. Think through the implications for your reading of the morning paper, watching the nightly news, or surfing the Net; how can you be informed in a way that is transforming of you and the world? In all of this we strive against a compartmentalized faith, and for a coherent one — for the glory of God and in service to the world.

Too much information? I am sure that Billington is right, and his concerns are ones that we need to seriously ponder. He himself argues that information is not the same as knowledge, and is a million miles from wisdom. The challenge of our age for Christian students is to follow the vocation of Jesus, knowing and loving the world in all its brokenness — philosophically, historically, biologically, politically, chemically, morally, psychologically, artistically and on and on — learning to live in it and for it ... with the joys and the sorrows woven into the pattern of our days. As it was for Jesus, it is for us.