Important Update:

Michel Bartel's date and time has moved to March 28th at 7pm.

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In the four years of it's existence, the Civitas program has attempted to integrate itself with the campus community. The first year of the Civitas Lecture Series is yet another way the program intends to incorporate the campus community with Civitas activities.

The first speaker for Lecture Series is theologian Michelle Bartel, a former Augustana religion professor. Now a pastor at Trinity United Presbyterian Church in New Washington, Ind., Bartel is excited about returning to Augustana and the Sioux Falls community.

"This place and its people are dear to me," Bartel said. "It seems to me that the giftedness of students and staff continues to deepen."

Her lecture, entitled "Love, Something a Good Deal More Dangerous: The Power of Subversive Ethics," will speak to the role of compassion in ethical discernment.

The lecture aims to address questions such as: What kind of life do you want to live? Who do you want to be? How will you figure that out? Her lecture includes all that plus virtues, love, rationality, compassion, Firefly, Buffy and much more.

"I'm hoping folks leave excited to think about themselves and their lives," Bartel said.

Bartel believes in the importance of integrating faith into education, maintaining that without doing so people risk leaving questions unanswered.

"One of Augustana's greatest gifts as an institution is this inclusion of faith: rejection of faith as a valid element of intelligence and understanding leads to a rejection of faith itself," Bartel said. "And that leads nowhere good, as we can see in the news every single day. The inclusion of faith in education also allows for integration in a student's life."

Civitas is founded on principles derived from the work of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose ideas will be included in Bartel's lecture as well.

"Bonhoeffer was a worldly guy," Bartel said. "He loved the world and was convinced that God and the world are inseparable. So students soaking in this radical way of thinking about living in the world here and now for the sake of the world?"

Civitas student senior Crystal Ortbahn plans to attend Bartel's lecture.

"I'm interested in the lectures because of my interest in living responsibly," Ortbahn said. "I expect her to make connections between Bonhoeffer's definition of responsibility and the idea of love. How love can help or hinder acting responsibly is an interesting idea."

Jeffrey Miller, director of the Civitas program, emphasized that these are not lectures for the Civitas program exclusively.

"The lectures speak to the elements of Civitas, but that doesn't mean someone outside of the program can't get something from them," Miller said. "We want the honors program not to be just a set of classes, but to help lift the academic boat," Miller said.

Co-sponsoring the lecture is the Stanley L. Olson Chair for Moral Values.

"Many people believe compassion to be at the heart of who we are as moral beings," Chair of Moral Values Janet Blank-Libra said. "One of my goals is to focus on the intelligence of emotions."

Miller is enthusiastic about bringing a "dynamic" speaker to campus and having the Civitas program sponsor lectures for the entire academic community.

"We want to bring in speakers presenting on topics of importance to the honors program and the campus as a whole," Miller said.

The lectures will begin at 7 p.m. on March 7 and March 14 and are free and open to the public. The second lecture will feature ecologist Carter Johnson.