Not long ago I heard a modern parable that goes something like this: In the early 1960s, shortly after committing this nation to “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” President Kennedy paid a visit to the folks at Cape Canaveral whose workaday task it was to make his promise a reality.

Thirty years ago this week I arrived at Georgetown as a freshman and moved onto Fourth Darnall. Twenty years ago this week I professed my first vows as a Jesuit. Looking back, I now see that those two events were not unrelated.

As far as I can tell, there are several different kinds of country songs. There are the ones designed to make you feel good about being an American, so good that you want to bomb people who aren’t. Don’t like those much. There are those that suggest all the reasons why you’re perfectly right to get cat-kicking drunk on a lonely Tuesday night. Not wild about those either.

Arizona was a great place to grow up during the 1960s and 1970s. It was there and then that I made my first attempts to understand what it means to be a human being. I was young and often nervous, but I was smart and, most of the time, I paid attention to what was going on around me.

As preregistration rolls around next week, it’s worth giving a serious thought or two to the kind of courses you want to take, the kinds of professors you want to learn with, the kinds of ideas you want to wrestle with, the kinds of things you want to learn. In short, it’s a good time to take stock of the education you are getting at Georgetown.

Before anything else, a disclaimer: In this column, I speak for no one but myself. I do not speak for the Jesuit Community. Happily, others bear that weighty burden. I speak for Fr. Ryan Maher, S.J., Georgetown Class of 1982.

Last week, The Voice and THE HOYA (“GU Investigates Academic Culture,” Aug. 31, 2007, A1) published a link to the report of the Committee on Intellectual Life. That leak has certainly sparked some vigorous thinking and conversation in Hoya circles!