Berkeley Divinity School Confers Five with Honorary Degrees

Berkeley Divinity School at Yale conferred five honorary doctorate degrees at an Oct. 12 evensong during convocation and reunions week. Pictured at far left is Joseph Britton, Dean of Berkeley Divinity School and, at far right, George A. Fowlkes, chair of the Berkeley Board of Trustees. Honorees, left to right, are Kirk Stevan Smith, Episcopal bishop of Arizona; Robert Henry Alexander Eames, Anglican primate of All Ireland; Sandra Sanderson Swan, former president of Episcopal Relief and Development; Jon Meacham, managing editor, Newsweek Magazine; William G. Andersen, Jr., former executive director of the Episcopal Church Foundation.

Smitth and Eames were awarded the doctor of divinity degree. Swan, Meacham and Andersen received the doctor of humane letters.

The rich texture of your experience reveals the sources of your insights. From your childhood on City Island, the Bronx, you learned that the bonds of local community form the basis of faith and life. From your education in outdoor management at Cornell University (1957) and public management at New York University (1965), and through service as a Marine Corps officer (1957-61), you learned that human life must be organized and managed, but that organizations are systems which must adapt in order to fulfill their promise. Your love of the sea alerted you to life's dynamism, and your instinct for fair housing and civil rights activism sharpened your commitment to justice.

Your passions fueled a career of public service, with stops at the Regional Plan Association in 1962 and the Urban Studies Center at Rutgers University in 1968. From 1970 to 1987 you rose from Research Associate to Assistant Director of the National Civic League where you promoted citizen involvement in community development and governmental decision making before joining the Episcopal Church Foundation in 1988. Grounding work in faith, you have been a member of St. George's Church, Maplewood, New Jersey, serving in leadership roles for the parish and the Diocese of Newark. Family and community have framed your commitment. In turn your spiritual journey has been a beacon for the journeys of others.

Understanding the frailties of organizations, yet dedicated to their promise, you have devised redemptive possibilities for them, and especially for the church. Above all you have applied your talent to clarifying the Episcopal Church's task and strengthening its capacities amid profound challenges and opportunities. In these endeavors you have led through personal example and compassion. In grateful recognition of your dedicated service, the Board of Trustees of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale is pleased to confer on you the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

Sandra Sanderson Swan, you have distinguished yourself by your love of God, your compassionate heart and your dedication to helping improve the lot of your fellow human beings, especially those less able to act on their own behalf. Your all-embracing spirit, which was instilled during your youth in the vast farmlands of Nebraska, has endowed you with a sense of purpose and enthusiasm that is the foundation of your ministry. Your intellectual curiosity was nurtured in the one-room schoolhouse you attended until high school, and it stood you in good stead as you graduated from the University of Nebraska in three years. Shortly thereafter, you received a Master's Degree from Baylor University and an MBA from the Stern School, New York University's School of Business.

Your interest in communications and corporate philanthropy soon launched you on a successful career in marketing and development. You gained valuable experience and expertise as a manager in a wide variety of organizations from the arts, education and publishing to not-for-profit agencies. A life-long Episcopalian, you brought your core belief in social justice and your exceptional organizational talent to help these organizations refocus their mission and improve their programs. Your conviction that God calls us to live out authentically his command to “love your neighbor” has made you a tireless advocate for bettering the lives of all people everywhere. Under your energetic and visionary leadership, the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief was transformed from a worthy charity into an efficient and effective global aid organization, now known as Episcopal Relief and Development. Thanks in large part to your efforts, ERD's record and reputation for providing emergency disaster relief is recognized as a model worldwide.

Sandra Sanderson Swan, in recognition of your devotion to the Church, of the example you have set in word and deed, of your ability to turn compassion into action, and of your gift for spreading the gospel of hope to all of God's people, Berkeley Divinity School at Yale is pleased to bestow upon you the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

Jon Meacham, you are the managing editor of Newsweek Magazine, a publication with worldwide circulation of more than 4 million and a total readership of more than 21 million. From a very young age, you have woven your life of faith into your professional conduct. You have shown a leadership in both the media and the church that is deeply religious without frivolous pietism. You are what Senator John Danforth calls a “moderate Christian soldier.”

Born in Chattanooga in 1969 you were baptized at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, attended St. Nicholas Episcopal School, and The McCallie School, graduating cum laude. In 1991 you graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English Literature from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where you were salutatorian and were elected to Phi Betta Kappa. You currently serve as a member of the University's governing Board of Regents and chair the Regent's committee on the College of Arts and Sciences. In addition to your editorial responsibilities at Newsweek, you have written for the New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Washington Post Book World. In 2001 you edited Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement and you have been a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. Under your direction, in 2001, Newsweek won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence—the industry's highest honor—for its coverage of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath. In 2003, the magazine won the award again for its coverage of President Bush and the Iraq war. That same year, your prize-winning book Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship was published. Your call has not only included your professional accomplishments but you also serve in New York City on the vestries of St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue and Trinity Church Wall Street.

You have proven yourself to be an accomplished writer, historian, journalist and observer of American religious life, writing with a critical eye, a keen intellect, and an abiding faith. Where people in the news business are stereotyped as secular, you are deeply faithful; where they are stereotyped as liberal, you are ideologically objective about your work. As your friend Sam Williamson, former Chancellor of your alma mater has said, “a towering leader among American journalists.”

Jon Meacham, we bestow this degree now both as a way of honoring your present accomplishments, and as a sign of our confidence that you will continue to serve the church and society in significant ways in the future. For the example you set by the way you live your life and reflect the strength of your faith in all that you do, the Board of Trustees of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale is proud to confer upon you the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

Kirk Stevan Smith, fifth Bishop of Arizona, you were born in Soap Lake, Washington, where your father served as Presbyterian pastor to his very first congregation. Later his work for the national church meant you grew up in Washington State, New Jersey, and Arizona. You attended Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where your experience of the mystical, sensual, and artistic tradition of the Episcopal Church led to a gradual conversion.

A deepening faith and intellectual engagement with the Anglican tradition took you to Cornell University to earn a Ph.D. in church history and then to Oxford, England for a year of independent research. Though deeply interested in church history, you felt called toward the front lines of parish ministry. From the Diocese of Arizona you came to the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, graduating with the M.Div. in 1979, and were ordained in 1980. You served as assistant at St. John's, West Hartford and rector of St. Anne's, Old Lyme, Connecticut. In 1991 you were called to be rector of St. James' Church in Los Angeles. From a peaceful, rural town you entered a ministry of urban streets and homelessness, of earthquakes and civil unrest. Your part in helping this parish grow in size and diversity was recognized in 2000 when you were made a Canon of the Diocese of Los Angeles. In April of 2004 you were consecrated as Bishop Coadjutor of The Episcopal Diocese of Arizona, and were installed as the Fifth Diocesan Bishop of Arizona in October of that year.

Your ministry has been characterized by a strong commitment to ecumenism and interfaith dialogue, to the lessons of history for the life of the church today, to writing and teaching about the relationship of science and technology to religion and the implications of modern physics for Christian theology. Your episcopate has been marked by your concern to move the church from maintenance to mission, to engage the cultural richness of your diocese, particularly Hispanic and Native American ministries, and to involve youth in the life of the church. Yu have been committed to the reconciliation and gathering together of those in our church who hold strongly differing viewpoints, especially in regard to human sexuality. You have found spiritual nurture for your ministry as an Associate of the Order of the Holy Cross.

In conferring an honorary doctorate on graduates who are elected to the office of bishop in the Church, Berkeley Divinity School wishes to signify the importance of the teaching ministry of the episcopate. This practice hearkens back to the ancient tradition of “Lambeth doctorates” conferred by the Archbishop of Canterbury on bishops in the Church of England. The gesture is in a sense an act of commissioning a new bishop to be the primary teacher of the faith in his or her diocese. So with that commission in mind, and in recognition of your service to the church, as well as your passion for relating the beauty of the Anglican tradition to our fast-paced, culturally diverse, technological, and spiritually hungry society, the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale is pleased to confer upon you the degree Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa.

Robert Henry Alexander Eames, you were born in 1937 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, into a community whose strife and anguish shaped your ministry of reconciliation for the rest of your life. The elder child of a Methodist minister, you were educated at the Belfast Royal Academy and Methodist College, and then at Queen's University where you obtained both a law degree and doctor of philosophy.

Leaving the law profession behind, you studied theology at Trinity College, Dublin, and in 1963 began a remarkable pastoral ministry that was marked wherever you were called by a witness for peace and understanding during the “Troubles” of your native land, even to the point of putting yourself between a mob and small child to protect her safety. In 1975, at the age of 38, you were appointed the bishop of the cross-border diocese of Derry and Raphoe, and made a strong witness for ecumenical solidarity by inviting your catholic counterpart to your ordination. After serving also as the bishop of Down and Dromore, you became Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland in 1986.

In that capacity, you have become the senior statesman of the Anglican Communion. Three times Archbishops of Canterbury have turned to you to chair commissions that helped to see the church through anxious times. First, in 1989 the Commission on Communion and Women in the Episcopate charted the course for holding the Anglican Church together when it threatened to split over women's ordination. Then in 1996, by way of giving greater theological depth to the idea of communion, the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission authored under your leadership The Virginia Report. And most recently, in 2004 the Lambeth Commission on Communion authored The Windsor Report which addressed the crisis created in the church over issues of homosexuality, calling the whole church to those “enhanced levels of understanding which are essential to the future of the Anglican Communion.”

Given your leading role in these efforts to deepen the relationships of communion in our church, it is no accident the commissions you have chaired have simply come to be called, “The Eames Commission.” Indeed, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has said that you “represent something very distinctive about the Anglican Church itself.” And what is that? “It is something to do with a temper of mind and soul, a habit of disciplined fairness and patience, a sense of the absolute priority of gospel loyalties over and above anything remotely sectarian, and it is not only a deeply attractive temper but one that achieves things that otherwise would be impossible.”

Robin Eames, for your faithfulness as a pastor, your courageous witness for peace in the face of violence, your unfailing commitment to the gospel, and your theological and ecclesial acumen in guiding the Anglican Communion through rough seas, the Board of Trustees of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale is pleased to confer on you the degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa.