A word about educational technology.
This thing is brand new, and it’s pretty cool. Notre Dame built it in-house and in 2025 began handing it out as a gift to every first-year student at the outset of each academic year, the way high schools pass out laptops. It weighs maybe a pound. It’s highly interactive, handcrafted and comparatively inexpensive. It wouldn’t fit into your pocket, but is sized more like a journal, which its designer says “befits the intimacy we hope students experience” with it. It is rather handsome. You can see students carrying it on the quads on autumn afternoons. Even better, they are talking about it, not just in classrooms, but in conversations and contemplations shared in dorm rooms and study lounges all over campus. It opens the world to its user. Unlike the prebaked answers of ChatGPT, it holds the very beginnings of one’s own answers to the biggest questions of all. It presents hard-won wisdom and vital wellsprings of illumination, hope and personal renewal; it is a map and compass toward accepting one’s own belovedness and finding within that belovedness the grist for making the singular contribution to human flourishing that each user, and only that user, might make. Finally, it is exceedingly user-friendly. You spend time with it, you gather in a room with other human beings, open it before you and ask:
What does it mean to live a good life, and how might I live one?
“It” is the commonplace book, its lowercase title as intentional as virtually everything else about it, and it’s the centerpiece of a unique vision within higher education: the Moreau Program and its First-Year Seminar, a one-credit course every Notre Dame student now takes in the fall of their matriculation.
On one level, the commonplace book is what you think it is: a piece of circa A.D. 1450 technology — or 868 C.E., if you prefer China’s block-printed product to that of Gutenberg’s press. It’s an appropriately glorified course packet, a thoughtful presentation of readings, mostly “perennial texts from classic thinkers” in the words of its loving cocreators. But unlike the flimsy, cramped, spiral-bound, inky packet you once picked up at the copy shop, the commonplace book is substantial and beautiful. Its selections are reprinted with fat margins for notes and thoughts, asterisks and page references, impassioned epiphanies and tart excoriations. Lined, empty pages invite the copying of quotes and their probing, handwritten consideration, and they’re thick enough to keep one page’s gel-pen revelation from bleeding through to the next. A gold ribbon marks the place of a passage designated for scrutiny or simple sharing.
To understand the value of the commonplace book, and what the Moreau Program is and isn’t, requires some institutional history. Up to the fall of 2015, Notre Dame undergraduates faced a two-credit physical education requirement for graduation. Then the University joined the majority of American universities that have bagged P.E. Like some schools, it shifted instead to a model of life-skills training, invited faculty and staff to apply to teach it, and took a topical approach to its curriculum for first- and second-semester freshmen: wellness practices, how to approach alcohol, diversity training, classroom participation skills. That sort of thing. The “du Lac owners’ manual,” some administrators called it. The official name was the Moreau First-Year Experience, named in honor of Blessed Basil Moreau, the founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross who once defined education as “the art of helping young people to completeness,” and while many students benefited from it, many also regarded it as busy work. Also, the faculty hadn’t bought in: Only one in eight of the Moreau instructors were professors.
“If your faculty aren’t on board with your curriculum, the one thing that’s required of all students, that’s a problem,” says William Mattison ’03Ph.D., the Wilsey Family College Professor of Theology and, as of 2023, faculty director of the Moreau Program, now a joint endeavor of the Office of Student Affairs and the undergraduate education arm of the provost’s office.
John McGreevy ’86, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost — and now a Moreau instructor — says the new approach began with conversations about what “would elevate the tone, get students thinking about big-picture questions right away, and would attract at least a portion of our faculty effectively to volunteer to teach it.”
Volunteer? All Moreau instructors receive a stipend, but the course does not count toward a professor’s teaching responsibilities. Yet Mattison says the revamped Moreau, shaped and vetted by an enthusiastic faculty committee drawn from every corner of campus, now boasts two-thirds of its 120-plus instructors coming from the ranks of the University’s full-time scholars.
A primary goal was to replace the information-driven approach with a course organized around grounding ideas like tradition, gratitude, friendship and vocation, in which takeaways from the readings and classroom discussion one week might find magnified relevance the next: ideas building upon ideas, wrestled into conversation with one another and questioned, challenged, revisited and tested, then embraced or rejected in search of something like bedrock truth. “Like I always say, ‘the true precedes the good,’ the famous Joseph Pieper expression about Aquinas,” Mattison says. “You want to talk about the good life, but it matters what’s true.”
The seminar progresses from a two-week unit in which students begin to conceive of themselves as “invited” (to Notre Dame, to a good life), then for four weeks as “beloved,” (by those closest to them, by friends old and new, by themselves and ultimately by God), and from that as “called” (to friendship, community, dignified labor, soulful rest, life vocation). Each week, a new question: How can we respond to suffering and brokenness? How can we practice life-giving leisure?
Their guides? Too many to list, but how about Helen Keller and St. Francis of Assisi on gratitude? Former Notre Dame Magazine editor Kerry Temple ’74 and the Dutch Catholic spiritual writer Father Henri Nouwen on dignity. Maya Angelou on hope. Aristotle and C.S. Lewis on friendship. Dorothy Day on community; Dorothy Sayers on work; Thomas Merton, OCSO, on vocation.
It’s all about what it means to be human.
The readings are predisciplinary, meaning no one — least of all the bright 18-year-olds bearing down on them with fresh minds and eyes — needs to be a philosopher, a poet or specialist of any kind to grasp and profit from them. “You shouldn’t have to be an MLK scholar to be able to read a seven-page sermon on ‘Loving Your Enemies,’” Mattison says of one reading the book presents for Week 8 reflection on community.
Nor are all the selections avowedly Christian, though many are, and the provost says that’s as it should be. Most important, says Neil Arner, Moreau’s associate faculty director and an associate teaching professor in the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, is the opportunity students have to consider how “living well or not is largely a matter of how one orders one’s loves,” and that “one is able to love because one is first loved.”
The new seminar bears yet another distinction from its precursor. Every Notre Dame student takes it in the fall of freshman year. The second credit will now come in a capstone, currently under construction, that not freshmen but seniors will take the spring before they graduate, the lessons of one life transition resurfacing in the pondering of another, four years later.
The freshman seminar and its commonplace book do not target any particular social, cultural or political problem. The spirit, says Mattison, the incoming chair of the theology department, is more positive, constructive, essential. Yet he acknowledges the vision has some preoccupying concerns. One is the hamster wheel of relentless credentialing and achievement culture that many students arrive at college having galloped upon for years. Another is that lack of rest. Not “downtime” spent on screens, social media and other electronic entertainments, but genuine rest. The board-bound book, with its smooth, blue cover, its friendly Garamond lettering, its golden roots-and-tree logo, addresses this in all kinds of ways. Students “love the hour a week they spend” with it, doing the short readings, marking them up for discussion, selecting quotes that speak to them, writing their reflections by hand, Mattison says. “They’re like sponges in water.”
A third concern is the endangerment of the proposition that people matter, that genuine encounter with other people matters, which is why so much class time is devoted to discussion among small groups, why early in the semester instructors devote time to the importance and practice of listening. “So although we didn’t target this course as a response to polarization and whatnot,” by which Mattison presumably means artificial intelligence, the constant titillation of smartphone notifications and a billion other distractions, “we’re hoping to inculcate in people practices of listening, of holding people accountable to their ideas, discussing big-picture things in a manner that’s relevant,” he says.
And yet there is a broader context, Arner notes. A moral and philosophical theologian by training and self-described “38th grader” by joyful vocation, Arner is the commonplace book’s chief architect, the one who proposes most of the readings reviewed by the committee, writes all the author introductions, and designs and produces the physical book. A Yale alumnus four times over, he points to the April 2026 Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education to show how the Moreau seminar already models “that which many in higher education are scrambling to recover.”
Speaking to that Yale committee’s “imperative to understand what we are here for and what universities do best,” he points to Moreau’s Week 2 session on tradition, when students parse Notre Dame’s mission statement, written by Rev. Edward “Monk” Malloy, CSC, ’63, ’67M.A., ’69M.A., when he was president in 2003. To Yale’s recommendation that classroom experiences cultivate “sustained attention, intellectual curiosity, and disciplined habits of mind,” Arner notes an excerpt from the writings of the Japanese American painter Makoto Fujimura (Week 6, hope) and an elective seminar event in which students visit the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art for an exercise in disciplined attention. The list goes on, but the most telling of all is the Yale professors’ complaint that “there is no single course, book, work of art, or scientific experiment that every Yale student is guaranteed to explore before graduation. In a university that prizes specialization, something shared is missing.”
In response, they proposed the creation of a “civic education initiative.” McGreevy thinks that’s a timely, “terrific” idea. But at Notre Dame, that “something shared” already decocts into two words: human formation.
“I think ‘formation’ is a tough word for many places to say, and we can say it at Notre Dame with confidence,” he says. “And that’s part of our Catholic mission.”
Does he see Moreau making decisive differences in the Notre Dame student once it has more time to root? “I don’t want to claim too much for one credit,” the provost, a leading historian of Catholicism, demurs, but he insists upon the program’s foundational fit. “Listen, we’ve never said at Notre Dame that we’re just training technical experts. We’ve always had bigger ambitions than that: that we want moral, thoughtful leaders. And if you want that, you need to be asking big-picture questions right away and routinely through someone’s four years . . . agnostic of major.”
It’s not that post-15th-century technology has no place in the Moreau seminar, though during class, laptops are verboten and phones stowed away. In fact, once they’ve finished a week’s reading, students follow a QR code to a prerecorded video message. Explains Andrew Whittington ’14, ’16M.Ed., Moreau’s senior program director: “Those are campus leaders, faculty, staff, who do a similar task of drawing upon the reading . . . and refracting it down in a personal way, based on their disciplinary excellence” and professional experience. So you get, for instance, Jennifer Newsome Martin ’07MTS, ’12Ph.D., associate professor of theology and director of the deNicola Center of Ethics and Culture, reflecting on gratitude in Week 3, or Rev. John Jenkins, CSC, ’76, ’78M.A., past president of the University, considering vocation at seminar’s end in Week 11.
Part of Whittington’s job is to coordinate the seminar’s co-curricular events. Students must register for and attend three throughout the semester. Last fall they included a chance to learn kintsugi; a prayer lesson with Rev. Kevin Grove, CSC, ’09M.Div.; a walk of the campus lakes with scientist-theologian Rev. Terrence Ehrman, CSC, ’91, ’99M.Div. Students hungry for some 21st-century light and magic could zip through the cosmos at Jordan Hall’s Digital Visualization Theater, catch a screening of Selma or watch and discuss — with Arner — an episode of the Twilight Zone-inspired television series Black Mirror, in which “every possible conversation with a person is rated on a five-star basis,” and cumulative ratings are available at all times. “Obviously it’s super-relevant for students,” he says, grinning.
This is to say nothing of other important features of the course: the “Moreau neighborhoods,” the “life labs,” the upperclassman peer leaders.
But, the book. The book is the thing. The idea of a commonplace book, a kind of journal of one’s reading and the thunderbolt quotations that readers consider seminal to their own views of life, arranged in a “common place” according to topics of personal importance, goes back to first-century figures like Pliny the Elder. It bloomed among the medievals, then took off with the proliferation of books in the Renaissance, when people from all walks of life started recognizing, in Arner’s words, that “there’s just so much stuff out there and it’s hard to collate it.” Famous practitioners include Isaac Newton, writers from John Milton to Virginia Woolf, American presidents like Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan. Mattison learned about these books from Angel Adams Parham, a University of Virginia sociologist and coauthor of The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classic Literature, who teaches the practice and advised him to consider it.
Notre Dame’s commonplace book diverges from custom by calling the topics and preselecting the texts, but the tradition is loose, and anyway the Moreau people encourage students to enter other sources into the conversation. Nor is anyone meant to take the readings as Scripture. “We’re not saying we want you to think this way,” Mattison double-underlines. “We want you to engage this.” Whatever a student thinks about it, McGreevy’s catchphrase is “‘Go to the text.’ And as soon as someone says, ‘Well, on page 44, the author says . . .’” he pauses and leads the room in a round of applause.
The point, Mattison adds, is “active participation in the tradition.” And that begins with markup. When introducing the book, Arner plays a recording of Billy Collins reading his 1996 poem, “Marginalia”:
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script. . . .
Mattison says he is “hugely pleased” with response to the seminar so far. His team collaborates with Institutional Research to gather survey data that can produce some controversies. Simone Weil’s classic 1942 essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” seemed a slam-dunk by virtue of its title alone, but Weil’s “peculiar” style made the reading “tough sledding” for some, he says, even among the faculty — the lowest-rated reading of the pilot course. Despite its yielding one of the most provocative discussions, he adds, the committee ruled Weil out for 2026-27.
As a qualitative metric, Arner points to the seminar’s final assignment, a 1,000-word “letter to my senior self.” Students are asked to look backward and forward, reflect on how ideas have helped them think or act differently, identify practices they intend to cultivate. The “moral seriousness” of these letters, he says, is itself a kind of success.
Many instructors have told Arner that the seminar experience has improved their core teaching, that the course itself is good for the soul. “I don’t know anything more about these readings than the students do,” McGreevy admits. “It’s fun to be learning together with a group of astonishingly bright, ambitious, idealistic 18-year-olds.”
Meanwhile, the committee hammers away at ideas for the senior capstone. What it will look like, whether it will have a commonplace book, is to be determined. But Whittington is certain it will fortify “the importance of encountering people.” And Arner affirms that these heavily personalized freshman books will be there for students to revisit, spurring “a kind of conversation they can have even across a lifetime.”
For some, especially in the more technology-oriented disciplines, the commonplace book is quite possibly the only book they’ll acquire at Notre Dame. For most, it is hoped, it’s the one they’ll most want to keep.
John Nagy is managing editor of this magazine.