It was the worst of times; it was the best of times ... and it was a long time ago. Today it is the ethically nuanced, morally contingent, pluralistic, diverse, deconstructed, emotionally charged, socially located postmodern times.

The best and worst had their field day in a world of black-and-white TV, black-and -white segregation, and black-and-white thinking. Easy to romanticize, easier still to explain and live. Father knew best.

But times have changed. The walls of separation between the sexes, the races, the young and old, the hetero- and homosexual, the religious and the unbelieving have been breached. Today's full-color televisions whose satellite feed comes from around the globe, lightning-quick Internet pages which are windows into every type of person and thought imaginable, show us a complexity of interrelatedness no one previous has ever had to face. And face it we must, unless we hole up in Waco with crates of semi-automatic weapons under our beds.

So what do we do when our values and way of life are decentered by the aggressively diverse world pounding on our doors for admission? Too many of us buy DVDs of "The Andy Griffith Show" to remember simpler times when every "man" knew "his" place and when he didn't, someone made a joke about it so that we'd laugh.

But like it or not, postmodernity is crashing the black-and-white modern party by inviting colorful guests in, and asking them to belly-dance.

As it should.

Who can escape the full tilt of the world when technology dumps every kind of person right into our home offices and living rooms? Sure, we can turn off the TV, unplug the Internet, move into a neighborhood whose skins match ours, get all our social needs met in synagogue or church, all to avoid being challenged by a human being who sees the world through different eyes ... but why? Why would we do that?

I want to look at that dilemma for a moment.

Have you ever learned a foreign language? Becoming fluent in a second language is a lot of work, especially if you've never lived in the country where that language is spoken. Most students of high school Spanish can attest to the fact that the effort did not equal mastery and aren't even sure what it accomplished.

Imagine, then, that you are required to become a polyglot after only ever learning ig-Pay atin-Lay. Suddenly you're being asked to learn multiple languages well enough to be conversant in them, yet you didn't even learn much when you studied only one language.

Yes, exhaustion hits before you even start. Much more fun to get the "word of the day" email that expands your English vocabulary than to learn Wolof or Hindi, right? And how would those languages help you get by in your everyday life, anyway?

That's the feeling. We in the politically and economically powerful West are overwhelmed by the cacophony of voices clamoring for attention, bidding us to know them, to listen, after being hidden or held down for centuries. Strange voices are speaking. They come from obscure parts of the world, and from our inner cities. They come in unwritten languages, and dominant though ignored ones. They represent religious traditions we've seen as benign at best and as enemies at worst. The colorful strange are in our universities and our media. They are our next-door neighbors and participate in the global village. There is no escape.

How life is supposed to be lived is no longer a choice between two alternatives: the truth and the lies, my way or the highway, the right way and the other guy's wrong way. Rather, we believe ourselves to be in a footrace to establish the supremacy of a particular take on the truth to protect it from invasion, corruption.

With the aid of technology (which gives us both the ability to communicate instantly around the world as well as international travel which makes access to the remotest reaches of the earth possible) we are confronted with ways of life and belief systems that not only challenge our own, but in some cases have no common points of reference. In the extreme cases, foreign points of view threaten to overturn the grip we have on reality, which causes us to be defensive and angry, or anxious and fearful.

We imagine that the encroachment of new ideas, politics and religious viewpoints will change us. And we would be right.

Given the chaos at the postmodern party, with too many kinds of music and food to sample, it's no wonder that the primary response for many of us in midlife, especially, is: apathy.

Indifference of cosmic proportions seems a completely natural coping strategy! Let me work out my faith and life without the intrusion of the weirdly other. I can't handle the stimulus.

There is another way, however. In the next several columns, I want to look at what I call "the postmodern virtues." Rather than taking the all-or-nothing challenge (master 62 languages or champion the English-only cause), we can develop some postmodern muscles that mitigate the overwhelm and help us to navigate through a diversity of perspectives while retaining our affinity for and commitment to our own.

I humbly submit myself for consideration as your personal trainer.

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Julie Bogart is a business owner and graduate student in theology at Xavier University. She is married to Jon, and also is the homeschooling mother of five children. Discussion of this column can be found on her blog. Or you can email her at {email jbogart@cinci.rr.com}jbogart@cinci.rr.com{/email}. © copyright 2006 by Julie Bogart.