Steinberg says that achievement-oriented individuals--such as Harvard students--are particularly susceptible to this sense of uncertainty.

"Success, per se, is an important value at Harvard," he says. "But people [at Harvard] accept success critically and skeptically."

Once, Steinberg says, success was a "whole world view," and success meant being comfortable.

But Steinberg says that today's students are looking for something more.

"Knowing the limits of comfort, [students] know that success will not confer intrinsic worth," Steinberg says.

This was certainly true for David H. Sohn '93, a second-year law student and proctor in Canaday Hall B.

Like Goodson, Sohn says he had been working very hard and striving all his life, but had become disillusioned with the ideals of material success.

"I just wasn't satisfied with 'whoever dies with the most toys wins,'" Sohn says.

The spark came when Sohn's roommate passed away while he was a first-year at the College.

"We don't know why he passed away, but it was a difficult time--it forced me to think about, for the first time, what happens when we die," Sohn says.

Sohn, who was an agnostic, turned to religion and ultimately became baptized after graduation as a means of renewal.

For others, like Sarah M. Rose '96, religion offered a sense of community--"not in the traditional Harvard sense, but it just reminded me of a past that I thought I had moved beyond and I found out it was integral to whom I belong."

"Judaism had always been associated with my family. I thought I'd left that behind but I can't," says Rose, a former arts editor of The Crimson.

In this sense, Steinberg says, religious tradition is a means of coping with questions of intrinsic worth and value.

An Increase

So in the broadest sense, there has been an increase of religious life at Harvard. While there may not be agreement on actual growth in terms of worshipers, there is little doubt that Harvard students today have a deeper sense of religion.

As Sohn put it, "Unless there's something that makes you think that there might be something more, you just keep going" through life "searching for the next goal."