There's another survey on a much different theme. A couple of days after the attack, nearly four out of five people said they were more likely to be drawn to prayer or to be attending religious services. Has your religious faith comforted you during this uncertain period?

Above: Patty Chen '02 is a double-major in biology and mathematics. Formerly president of the Asian Students Association, she is chair of an upcoming East Coast Asian Student Union Conference. She's president of the Few Quad Council and a worker in the Literacy Through Photography program. portraits:Les Todd

Luke Bergmann: One thing I've noticed is that a number of people who turned to their faith have found a lot of conflicts with it. They feel as religious believers different from how they feel as Americans. There are competing subjectivities: People will say my religion tells me one thing, but as an American I can't help but to feel differently.
Allison Brim: To build on that theme of conflicts, I find it interesting that everything from religious figures I've heard focuses on a non-violent reaction to terrorism. And the overwhelming majority of Americans, though they're attached to some faith, seem to be for some kind of military effort.
Martin Barna: In my personal faith, I'm Greek Orthodox. I haven't necessarily found myself feeling more or less religious as a result of the attacks. A lot of my friends who are not religious have asked me how I can believe in God when something like this happens. Of course, I go back to the standard line, which is, God doesn't manipulate how the world works every day.
Christine Varnado: In the aftermath of an event this traumatic, when everyone is feeling so psychologically adrift, one of the things that happens is that people really think about what is important to them. I think people find out what they want to commit to. On September 11, I think it was very significant that I felt I wanted to go to class. I felt that learning was our common purpose at this university, that I wanted to be engaged in that. And it strengthened my resolve to make a life in the academic world. A lot of people felt that the appropriate place for them was to be in a place of worship, and they may have discovered something about themselves.
Allison Brim: I definitely looked inside myself at my own spirituality. I think that's very important for people to be doing now; I feel that my spirituality dictates how I act.
Lala Qadir: This is a complex question. Muslims have sort of gone back to the basics and asked, what does Islam say about these things? In talking with people on campus about what Islam says, what it means to be Muslim, I've learned a great deal. If you believe in your faith and you learn more about it, it's a positive reinforcement. These terrorist attacks are completely anathema to the doctrine of Islam. In Islam, we have the Koran, which is the revelation from God, and we have the actions of prophet Mohammed, and we're supposed to embody in our actions what he said and did. Based on the teachings of Islam, there are very clear statements that when you engage in war, you can't harm innocent men, women, and children. And you can't hurt the environment or poison wells, which is an early statement against bio-chemical terrorism. When you see these people who, in some warped way, represent your faith, it's even more critical for you to understand yourself, what it really means to be part of that faith.
Chris Paul: I was pleased that there were interfaith services after the attacks. If there's anything positive to come out of this, I hope it will come from people looking for common points among religions.
Patty Chen: We need to realize that there are other religions in play, like Buddhism and Hinduism. It's interesting that when Duke held its interfaith service on the Chapel Quad, it had Islam and Judaism represented along with something like fifteen denominations of Christianity. But it didn't have a single Buddhist or Hindu represented.
Dylan Ashbrook: I can't understand how this would make anyone turn to God. The fact that the terrorists did this in the name of God would make me wonder about devoting your life to serve a higher power. If something very terrible happens to you, I don't understand how you benefit in talking to a higher power; I think the best thing to do is to look at how you can solve the problem with reason.
Mark Freeman: Religion doesn't dictate that God is going to make a perfect world. And religion isn't really based on logic. So a lot of people have turned to God in this situation, and I do think that it probably is a fleeting religious fervor. There is nothing rationally you can do if someone is flying an airplane into your building. But you need something to hang onto.
Neil Gupta: A distinction we need to make is between supporting a religion or turning to religion on an ideological basis or emotional basis. If we are talking about the terrorists, they were rationalizing their action by misusing religion. That's different from a religious person finding security in his faith.
Mark Freeman: These terrorists hate Americans. One of bin Laden's lieutenants was talking about U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, and he said, "We just want to kill all Americans." When I hear that, I can't equate that person and his feelings of religiosity and normal people's feelings of religiosity.

Above: Martin Barna '02 is a double-major in history and public policy. Former editorial page editor for The Chronicle, he continues as a columnist and as film editor for the weekly arts and entertainment supplement. He has acted in numerous Duke Players productions. Below: Mark Freeman '03, an Alumni Scholar, is a biology major. A Howard Hughes Research Fellow, he does neuroscience research.

portraits:Les Todd

Can you see sacrificing yourself or compromising your style of living for the sake of something bigger than yourselves--say, some great national cause?
Chris Paul: I would put myself in harm's way to work in a humanitarian situation, to try to provide humanitarian aid.
Mark Freeman: Everyone struggles with the fear of being shipped off to fight and with the knowledge that we wouldn't have this country to enjoy had people not sacrificed their lives in the past.
Dylan Ashbrook: I don't think unwarranted aggression is a good thing. However, I don't think I'd feel right enjoying all the benefits that our way of life provides if I weren't going to stand and fight for them if called upon. It would be useful to look into the historical reasons for why these seeds of hatred were planted. But when terrorists crashed those planes, they overstepped the bounds of civilized behavior, and you can't rationalize it on the basis of the U.S. planting a McDonald's in some other country.

There's a lot of talk about how September 11 may have affected art and entertainment, about the public reaching for a less frivolous spirit and a less ironic tone. What are you now looking for in your entertainment options?
Christine Varnado: One of the important functions of art has been to provoke thought on an abstract level. And that's what I see my friends and I being drawn to. I've also seen some really fascinating black humor; it's very interesting how, almost immediately after the attacks, we began to use that sort of thing to defend ourselves psychologically, to heal ourselves, and to try to put to rest these unthinkable events.
Luke Bergmann: Normally, I sit and laugh at The Onion. Right after these attacks, I was terrified by The Onion--it was vengeance without thinking, or "let's think about it, then blow them up."
Dana Vachon: Before the attacks, a lot of my friends and I were wrapped up in reality programming. I really enjoyed it. Since then, I've been reading a lot of fantasy. I've gotten into the Tolkien books; the Hobbits are these people who live in the Shire, and they love the Shire and want to do nothing but eat and get fat and smoke pipes--which is very much America during the Nineties. I've retreated away from irony, I've retreated away from reality and have gone into this fantasy realm where individuals can fight great evils and be successful. That's brought me a good deal of comfort.
After September 11, we've seen commentaries in The New York Times and elsewhere question the relevance of intellectual trends like postmodernism and postcolonial studies. Those are perspectives that deny the existence of absolute truths and question the superiority of Western values in particular. Have you rethought any lessons from a Duke classroom?
Dylan Ashbrook: I know this is a hard thing to say, but I think we have a better society than they do. People who would say that we need to respect a culture that allows for suppression of rights and executes people at will--I think that's horrible.
Neil Gupta: We should shift the conversation to why people around the world are upset with U.S. culture and U.S. policy. I heard a quote by a professor who said, "The three biggest exports of the U.S. are Washington, Hollywood, and Las Vegas." To an Afghani, ours may appear to be a decadent society.
Dylan Ashbrook: I don't doubt that if the Afghani people were shown the benefits of capitalism and of the opportunity for upward mobility, they would be in favor.
Neil Gupta: Maybe we don't have a policy of exporting American values, of making the world into another America. But I think that American policy and American culture are behind insidious, creeping forces that are the source of a lot of underlying frustration around the world.
Has America's new war compelled you to think differently about your courses?
Chris Paul: I'm in the "Humanitarian Challenges at Home and Abroad" FOCUS program, the freshman seminar program. Our entire program revolves around issues directly related to the terrorist attacks. Part of what we hope for in academia is to understand events like these on a real level and not just as a topical discussion on TV. I hope that universities can help lead a public discussion about the root causes of these events.
Neil Gupta: I'm really wary of over-intellectualization of the situation. A lot of times we here at Duke or at other universities will attempt to make ourselves feel better about an issue by talking about it, as if that were going to accomplish something--which it usually doesn't. I feel that futility a lot and get frustrated by it.
Chris Paul: After September 11, I was struggling with the question, what went wrong? What happened? How can I change it? I can't go and work in Afghanistan now, and not all of us can aspire to be in high policy positions. But it did hit me that the simple saying that you see on bumper stickers, "think globally, act locally," is so important.

Above: Dana Vachon '02 is a political science major. A former humor columnist and now associate news editor for The Chronicle, he's a member of Duke University Improv. portraits:Les Todd

Christine Varnado: I've had some amazing discussions in my classes about these events; I've never felt more fortunate to be a part of the university than I do right now. I haven't encountered a single member of this community who would dispute the assessment that the slaughter of thousands of innocent people is wrong. That said, the discussions I've had have expanded my perspective. We've deconstructed The New York Times coverage, and we've looked at how even the physical organization of the paper--how the photographs are used--reflects an ideology. We've been talking about the decline of the nation-state and the postmodern shape of war, a war that's not being fought over land and where the enemy is not even a nation.
Lala Qadir: In my "Public Health" course, we've been discussing the ramification of September 11, albeit from a perspective of health and global social welfare. Our conversations started after we began to introspectively analyze the determinants of health, and the direct correlation of health to economic, social, and political stability. In our readings, we discussed the effects of war on children, women, and the refugee crisis. The horrific sights of death that children are witness to are factors in perpetuating a vicious cycle of hatred and instability. We need to be aware of this.
Luke Bergmann: I've done research with the Santa Fe Institute, which is a leading institution for the study of complex systems in science and beyond. One very interesting thing that was going around was that the institute should promote the understanding that this is a complex system, and that the world now requires an entirely different logic than the more simple, causal logics.
Patty Chen: My "Race and Equity" class turned into a class on a very personal level about racial profiling. How would we feel if we saw, for example, an Arab American acting a little bit suspiciously? Would we want that person searched in a particularly thorough manner? Some of us said yes, and some of us said no.
Martin Barna: In my "History of Science and Technology in the Ancient World," the professor talked about the contributions of Muslims, and he went on quite eloquently about the consequences when religion is perverted. Outside of class, some friends who graduated recently and I have a book club on the Web. We read a book and discuss it for a month. We were ten days into our discussion of Saul Bellow's Ravelstein when the tragedy happened. And we wove the themes together.
Dana Vachon: I've drawn from Ravelstein as well; it's about a very intelligent person facing death. There's a passage where he talks about how he's waited his entire life to just see a brief glimpse of what living is all about. That's something that I've personally taken to heart in this time. To Ravelstein, death comes because of AIDS. You know, if it's AIDS or a building that collapses on you, it doesn't negate the importance of living well. And maybe that means not going to Wyoming and working on a dude ranch. Maybe that means just continuing with the plan to be in New York next year.