Life of the Mind Seminar: Kristin Collier on Medicine and God (Registration Required)

Registration Deadline is Friday, March 1 at 5 PM. Apply Here

About Registration:

• Seminar participation is limited to facilitate discussion in a spirit of intellectual freedom and mutual respect. 
• Undergraduate and graduate students are especially encouraged to apply. 
• Dinner is served at all seminars, and light readings will be assigned.
• You must complete a questionnaire to be considered for acceptance. Registrations close one week before each seminar.

About the Seminar

Health on the Portico of Heaven

Medicine is a practice focused on human beings and is a human profession in its purest form. Today there is disenchantment in the calling of medicine wrought through the sciences and technical knowledge divorced from higher wisdom and virtues found in God. Secular science by itself cannot tell us how medicine ought to be. Philosophical wisdom aiming towards higher goods is necessary in medicine’s conception of health. Health in the negative - the absence of disease - is an impoverished vision of humanity that aims not at God or the things of God. Medicine ought to be built upon the wisdom of the humanities in order to ensure the science of medicine is humane under God. Medicine and bioethics are in the midst of a crisis because we have lost the foundation of understanding how mankind is created in God’s image and no longer have a vision of human flourishing that involves relationship with

God. Relationships under God and shalom are at the heart of who we were created to be as people groups, not individuals apart from God. Instead of seeing our identity and meaning being one that is anchored in relationship, we instead see ourselves as atomized individuals who only find flourishing by creating our own independent truth and reality in expressive individualism that sees the body only as a tool to be used to operationalize one's will. Under this anthropology, man is his own god who seeks to achieve whatever he or she wills, even overcoming one’s own bio-constraints through the use of technology as witnessed in the transhumanism movement. With relationship in mind, health and healing should be defined first and foremost as right relationships. Right relationship with God and one another. In this seminar, Dr. Collier will take us through an understanding of health as right relationship and one that reflects God’s relational nature. The readings for this seminar will include a piece written by Dr. Collier titled What is Medicine For, Edmund Pelligrino’s The Telos of Medicine and the Good of the Patient, and a piece written by Marco Bardazzi, Servant of God Enzo Piccinini: Everything I Did I Did for Happiness.

Kristin Collier, MD, FACP, is an associate professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan where she serves as the director of the University of Michigan Medical School Program on Health, Spirituality and Religion. She is also an associate program director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program at U-M where she oversees the primary care track. Collier received her medical degree from the University of Michigan Medical School and completed her internship, residency and chief residency at University of Michigan hospitals. Her work has been published in JAMA, Internal Medicine, the Annals of Internal Medicine, Journal of General Internal Medicine, American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine as well as in Church Life Journal, Theopolis, America Magazine, and Public Discourse. She is a wife and proud mother of four boys.