Newman University will host its first speaker of the St. John Henry Newman Lecture Series at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 8, in the De Mattias Performance Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
Physician, scholar and writer Dr. Kristin Collier, MD, FACP, will deliver the first address, “In Defense of Human Dignity,” which is rooted in the university’s mission and code to respect the dignity of every person and embrace all humanity.
Collier emphasized the importance of conversations surrounding the topic of human dignity.
“We are currently in an anthropological crisis in society,” she said. “We have a distorted view of the human person, having lost a view of the Christian story that tells us that we are made in God’s image and because of that have inherent worth and inviolable dignity.”
She explained the danger of rooting human dignity in a person’s capacity or ability to contribute rather than the individual’s intrinsic value.
“We start to have tiers of human dignity, which end up marginalizing the most vulnerable members of our human family such as prenatal children, people with disabilities, people with dementia and the like … the ones we should have a special obligation to protect and defend,” Collier said.
She hopes attendees leave her lecture knowing that “the way we understand the value of human beings matters.”
“It shapes how we treat one another, influences how we allocate resources and informs which procedures and interventions we recognize as deserving the designation of ‘healthcare,'” Collier said.
Meet the speaker
Dr. Collier is an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she serves as director of the University of Michigan Medical School Program on Health, Spirituality and Religion and as an associate program director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program. She completed her medical school, residency and chief residency at the University of Michigan.
Her academic interests center on human dignity and the ways it grounds moral obligations at the margins of life.
Dr. Collier’s peer-reviewed work has appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine, the British Medical Journal, the Annals of Internal Medicine and The Journal of General Internal Medicine. Her broader writing has been published in Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal, Theopolis, America Magazine, Public Discourse, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. She is also a wife and the proud mother of four sons.
About the series
The St. John Henry Newman Lecture Series is co-sponsored by Newman’s School of Catholic Studies and the Gerber Institute for Catholic Studies. The lectures invite distinguished scholars, writers, scientists, artists and public figures to reflect on how the Catholic intellectual tradition has shaped their lives and work.
The series takes its name and its inspiration from the university’s patron, St. John Henry Newman, whose life testifies to the unity of faith and reason, the common good, the relationship between science and the transcendent and the nature of the university itself.
Each lecture is designed to offer more than an academic exercise; it is an invitation to reflect on the questions that matter most.
Learn more about the lecture series
For more information on the St. John Henry Newman Lecture Series, visit the official page on the Newman University website.
