Degree Recipients Honored at Convocation 2016

November 10, 2016

On October 18, 2016, representatives of the Berkeley Divinity School community – students, alumni, trustees, faculty, and staff – gathered in Marquand Chapel for Evensong and to witness the awarding of honorary degrees during Convocation 2016. Dean Andrew McGowan preached on the history of the dedication of the Berkeley chapel to St. Luke, as well as on the true medicine of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As the Dean put it, “We are here as committed to the training of those spiritual physicians… who will, with the chief physician as guide, offer their skills to lead communities of healing and wholeness. They can only do that work of healer as knowing themselves healed, or as still being healed. The therapeia of God is true, transformative, continuous, and not without pain, and goes on in this place in the service of the Holy Trinity, and under the patronage of St Luke.”


The Rev. F. Washington Jarvis, The Rt. Rev. George Sumner, Bruce Garner

Following the anthem, The Rev. Clayton Thomason, board Secretary ’94 M.Div., read with great flair a short biography of each degree recipient, Board Chair David Wilson admitted each to his degree, and Dean McGowan vested each in the academic hood. Three individuals were awarded honorary degrees.

The Rev. F. Washington Jarvis, who was made Doctor of Divinity, retired last year after eight years as head of Berkeley’s Educational Leadership and Ministry program. Fr. Jarvis is a priest and educator of great stature, having served 35 years as headmaster of Roxbury Latin School in Boston and since 1976 as Priest Associate of All Saints’ Church, Ashmont, in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood.

The Right Rev. George Sumner ’81 M.Div., who also was made Doctor of Divinity, is the eighth Bishop of Dallas, where he is chief pastor for more than 31,000 Episcopalians, 200 Clergy and 100 congregations. Bishop Sumner earned both his M.Div. and his PhD from Yale. He was previously the Helliwell Professor of World Mission and principal of Wycliffe College in Toronto, a leading divinity school of the Anglican Communion.

Bruce Garner, who was made Doctor of Humane Letters, is a leading member of All Saints’ Church in Atlanta, where he has been a member for thirty-five years and head verger for the past twenty. A longtime leader within the Episcopal Church, he is currently the president of Integrity USA, Inc., which “works for the full inclusion of all the baptized in all the sacraments,” and he has spent years as an advocate and champion of full inclusion of LGTB people and people living with HIV/AIDS in Church and community.

Following Evensong, all gathered for a reception in the YDS common room, after which the trustees and faculty, together with the honorees and their guests, adjourned to dinner at the New Haven Lawn Club. The evening was a very meet and right occasion for worship and the recognition of outstanding contributions to the church and world by members of the Berkeley Divinity School community.

- Andrew Kryzak ‘18 M.Div.