Montserrat: First-Year Experience

Our theme for this year is imagining being “for and with others.” Our cluster acknowledges that our Jesuit Mission challenges us to live lives in service of and in solidarity with others, but what does this actually entail? What structural, cultural, ethical, epistemic and historical challenges exist that might restrain our ability to enact this call to its fullest? Through explorations of history, literature, music, emotion and science we seek both positive models of cura personalis as well as interventions into the contemporary challenges to this mission. We will ask essential questions, such as: What systemic and cultural obstacles to this goal can different disciplines identify and address? How can art help us understand the challenges of the past to build a community of the future? How can the pursuit of more diverse and inclusive institutions support the Jesuit mission? How can developing a scientific understanding of contemporary challenges — and probing the nature of science itself — help lead us to possible solutions? How can cultural literacy help us see commonality as well as distinction? Ultimately, what the contemporary challenges cluster aims to explore is what it looks like for communities of individuals to live lives for and with others.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Ranier Maria Rilke counsels a fellow aspiring writer to “be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves … Live the questions now” (1993, p. 27). The Core Human Questions cluster offers seminars that invite students to love and live the questions that are at the heart of human experience and at the center of a liberal arts education. Drawn from the disciplines of biology, religious studies, sociology, dance, philosophy, and literature, our seminars highlight how different traditions of academic inquiry ask questions that are at the core of human life. Students will examine broad questions, such as: What does it take to be human? What makes human life meaningful? How should we live as individuals and in relation to others? More specifically, our seminars will encourage students to explore the experience of human life by asking what it means to be born, to die, and to move through the world as an embodied human; how histories and futures make human life meaningful; what it means to be a neighbor or welcome the stranger; and how we make sense of peace and security in relation to war and suffering. By asking such questions, students will challenge taken-for-granted notions about what makes us who we are and how we should live together in this world.

The theme for the Divine Cluster in 2025-2026 is Encounter. We offer “encounter” as a framework for considering the depth of meanings in concepts like "divine," "transcendent," and "spiritual" A focus on “encountering” calls us to the understanding that we are not merely autonomous individuals but instead exist in solidarity and interdependence with the world around us. Divine Cluster courses draw on religious, scientific, cultural, and artistic perspectives, encouraging students to reflect on theological traditions, ethical teachings, and culture to examine interrelated questions. How can experiencing aspects of the mind, relationships, culture, and societies be vehicles for approaching the divine? How do we encounter and act in solidarity with each other and the vulnerable members of our society? The seminars and co-curricular cluster events will call you to encounter ideas and people (in many cases through Community-Based Learning) that open up a deeper exploration of what is divine.

The Global Society Cluster explores the push and pull of globalization and anti-globalization from multiple perspectives.  What do these terms mean for individuals in a given time or place, for instance in Worcester today?  How do individual experiences intersect with much broader forces? Together, through various approaches across disciplines including visual arts, literature, political science, and history, we will examine how individuals have navigated cultural differences, and how communities around the globe experience personal, political and social change. Whose voices and stories often prevail?  Whose have often been buried? In what ways do we find the past in the present? Our seminars will incorporate works by artists and scholars from a range of geographical regions throughout and beyond the United States.  Cluster co-curricular activities will encourage building community and new perspectives through dialogue and active listening, as we reflect on our shared responsibilities as global citizens. Students in the cluster will also have opportunities to explore local cultural institutions and organizations in and around Worcester as we consider the city’s global reach.

Our world is one of fast-paced human and environmental change, although it has not always been this way. We have inherited institutions, structures, economies, and systems that have indelibly shaped our landscapes and waterscapes, sometimes in exploitative ways. This cluster examines the diverse ways humans have interacted with their surroundings through time and space, as well as the relationships and beliefs that have been developed around nature and the environment. The Natural World cluster seminars pursue shared questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives including literature, history, philosophy, mathematics, economics, visual arts, classics, and environmental studies. Over the course of the year, seminars will explore broad questions about the human relationship to the natural world, including: How can we (re)examine our ideas, values, and behaviors as we engage with the natural world? How can these efforts help foster our understanding and inspire us to become more reflective and active participants in the natural world?

The stories we hear, tell and see are crucial to our constructions of self and others. Narratives reflect, shape, and reinforce notions of self, other, and community. Who gets to tell the "official" stories? Who has stories told about them by others? How do individuals and communities author their own stories? Moreover, each of us experiences the world as a being who is embodied, self-aware, reflective, and connected with others. How does our sense of “self” emerge from our psychology? This “self” must make choices about how to live. In making these choices, we face many challenges, both individually and collectively. How does the self find meaning and purpose as it navigates interwoven and often conflicting sources and modes of identity and expression?  In what ways do rapidly evolving technologies enable, complicate, or undermine these processes of self-formation and authentic connection across multiple physical and imagined landscapes of community, meaning, and value?

Montserrat gives every entering student a “jumpstart” on exploring intellectual life at Holy Cross. By participating in small, interdisciplinary seminars at the start of their college careers, students have the chance to interact closely with faculty, staff and other students to create mentoring relationships that will grow stronger over their four years here. In addition to better integrating academic and social life, Montserrat provides intensive development in critical thinking and communication skills and ensures that students are engaging with serious intellectual and moral questions early in their time at Holy Cross. These skills and intellectual experiences will enhance every student’s chosen course of study, no matter what their major or career goals.

You will begin by reviewing Montserrat clusters and seminars. Please identify several seminars that sound the most interesting to you, regardless of your academic or career plans. Keep in mind that the clusters are interdisciplinary and attract students with different interests, goals and potential majors. You will select six seminars that are interesting to you and indicate these preferences during registration. Keep in mind that you are not ranking these seminars. You will be enrolled in one of your six preferred seminars in early August.

Each Montserrat seminar extends over the entire year, but there might be a different emphasis from semester to semester. Some seminars are team taught by professors from different disciplines, alternating semesters and providing contrasting perspectives on a topic. For example, for a seminar in Global Society on environmental sustainability, the fall semester could be devoted to an exploration into energy conservation with a physics professor, while the spring semester, led by a religious studies professor, could focus on issues of ethics and stewardship. Many other seminars are taught as a yearlong sequence by a single professor.

Your Montserrat seminars count as two of the 32 courses required to graduate from Holy Cross and fulfill one Common Area Requirement. In instances where a course might fulfill two different Common Area Requirements, the student will have the option of selecting which Common Requirement the seminar will fulfill (it cannot fulfill both).