Kennedy's sense of discipline springs largely from his background as the son of two Irish-Catholic immigrant families. Then Anne Hearne, Mrs. Kennedy left County Wexford in Ireland 30 years ago. She married James Kennedy, the son of an Irish Republican Army member from Donegal who immigrated around 1930.

Now the family (including David's brothers Michael and Peter) resides in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., a bedroom community of 7,018 about 55 minutes from Manhattan.

"It was my mom's dream that she would have a Harvard graduate, because that was making it," Kennedy says. "I really do feel this huge burden and I felt this real burden coming into Harvard just to maximize every minute and to just make every minute count, because, you know, I was the first in so many generations to have this chance...I just couldn't blow it."

He hasn't. As his friend and Lampoon coworker Adam J.B. Lane '93 puts it. "Dave's definitely one of the class go-getters...He juggles well with Perspective and debate and the Lampoon and all his classes. And he also has a social life, so you really have to tip your hat to him. He's also a normal human being."

No surprise for a world champion debater, Kennedy is particular about his distinctions. What he takes from Catholicism, he insists, is purely personal. He doesn't let the Church determine his views about things political or public--matters that can be "subjected to rational debate," as he puts it.

"The whole thing with Catholicism is that it really has kind of shaped my life and has often done so in completely opposite ways from which it would have intended," Kennedy says.

Personally, his Catholic upbringing has made him "queasy" about some of Harvard's more libertarian tendencies, especially those dealing with sex. For example, he often feels uncomfortable "going to an Adams House dance and seeing a guy wearing just a sock."

Still, he says these "inner prejudices" don't "involve making substantive choices that affect other people's lives." When it comes to politics, he may push the limits of what it means to be Catholic.

Gay marriage? For it. Abortion rights? Pro. Gays in the military? Sooner, not later. In short, Kennedy says he keeps his personal faith distinct from his political beliefs.

"I just find it extremely difficult to celebrate belonging to a church that actively excludes women from higher [ranks] of membership, has conducted a 2,000-year-old campaign to ensure that women remain barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen and views homosexuals as unnatural and deviant...," he declares.

So how does he derive his faith? "I think humanity's too much of a fuckup to have gotten us to where we are."

Kennedy says he's Catholic in culture, not in politics. But he jettisons such generalizations about Catholicism. "There are liberal Catholics," he reminds me. "Like the Jesuits.... The Jesuits are the best," he says with a smile.

THIS SPRING, TWO ELIOT HOUSE juniors began publishing Inside Edge, a national magazine whose cover promised articles on "women who love SEX" and "how to dump your girlfriend."

Kennedy found the sexism offensive and the writing inane. He blasted it in a screeching piece in Perspective (the campus "liberal monthly") and, bringing his extracurriculars together in a rare moment, worked on The Edge, a hilarious Lampoon parody.

"He was really nuts about the Edge thing," Lane says. "He was quite clearly appalled."