Final columns of second-semester seniors are usually pretentious, preachy and far too personal.

Since my columns are all of these things already, I figured it’d be silly to have a special column with sort of “Advice about Loyola.”

So let me share with you the reasons why I love this school: 14 Jesuit values.

*Education of the Whole Person We are more than our minds and greater than our careers. We are called to fulfill our potential, not because it will be profitable, but because it’s there.

*Well-Educated Solidarity The purpose of our education is not to be a success in the world but to make the world a success.

And we can’t just work for people, we also have to work with them. And so we have to learn.

*The Faith that Does Justice For must of us, this is a faith in a God, but for some of us, it is simply a faith in human betterment and potential.

For all of us, it is an insistence that people deserve better than this and the recognition that, like Gandhi, we can be the change we wish to see in the world.

*Critical Thinking The difference between intellectual honesty and ideology is that intellectual honesty seeks to find what is true and ideology seeks to prove itself true. What are your assumptions and how do they affect the way you view the world?

*Diversity Race, sexual orientation, religion, politics, gender and everything else – the differences do matter because they unite us in our commitment to celebrate what makes us unique

and beautiful.

*Roman Catholicism There’s something about 9 p.m. daily Mass at Ignatius Chapel that reminds me that my Church is not about power, nor is it about assuring me a place in Heaven.

It’s about Eucharist: about community, commitment to God and neighbor and the peace that only comes with rest in God.

*Praxis Do something, think about it, then do something again based on that thought.

Experience and theory are not opposed but rather dependent upon each other.

*Preferential Option for the Poor This is an assumption, and for me, a vital one.

We should not have forgotten the people we continue to forget.

*The Jesuits themselves I’m so grateful to the Jesuit Revs. Si Hendry, Stephen Rowntree, Eddie Gros, Pete Bernardi, Marvin Kitten, Jim Caime, Jim Deshotels and Bernard Knoth, Loyola’s president, who’s done a lot more for social justice than some people give him credit for.

*Freedom This is not the narrow freedom of certain contemporary economic thinkers, which is nothing more than isolation.

It is rather the liberty of self-knowledge and the freedom that comes with the recognition of our dependence upon each other and, for believers, on God.

*History We can move forward, and we are.

*The Image and Likeness of God All human beings have an inherent dignity.

*Beauty “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

And the only question that really matters: How can I – and the world – love as effectively

as possible?