College Announces 2014 Honorary Degree Recipients

The Board of Trustees of Albertus Magnus College has voted unanimously to confer the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters upon the following distinguished individuals at the College's 91st Commencement Exercises, Sunday, May 18:

Rabbi Herbert N. Brockman, a seventh-generation rabbi, has been the spiritual leader of Hamden's Congregation Mishkan Israel for nearly 30 years. Dedicated to promoting social justice and interfaith programs throughout greater New Haven, nationally and internationally, he has served on countless boards, including Interfaith Cooperative Ministries and Hartford Seminary; he is a lecturer at Yale Divinity School. Rabbi Brockman is passionate in his belief that involvement in the broader community is central not only to his synagogue's mission but important in the lives of all.

Drew S. Days III, civil rights activist, Peace Corps alumnus, teacher, author and public servant, came to New Haven in 1963 as a student at Yale Law School, receiving his LL.B. in 1966. Today, he is Yale's Alfred M. Rankin Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law. His has been a distinguished career in the law: staff member of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund litigating civil rights cases; assistant attorney general for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Justice; and solicitor general of the United States - the Government's lawyer in cases before the Supreme Court.

Janice McLaughlin, M.M., is president of the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic, the first U.S-based congregation of Roman Catholic women religious dedicated to overseas service. For nearly 40 years she served in Africa: first in Kenya and later in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Her articles documenting government atrocities there led to her arrest, imprisonment and deportation. When Rhodesia gained independence, the new government invited her to work as an education consultant in the President's Office, helping to develop a new system of education linking academic subjects and technical training.

Denys Turner is the Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology at Yale Divinity School. Prior to coming to Yale in 2005, he was the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge; he also taught at several other universities in the United Kingdom. His focus is the study of the traditions of Western Christian mysticism, with special emphasis on doctrines of religious language and of selfhood, and on the links between classical traditions of spirituality and mysticism and the social and political commitments of Christianity. He has written several books, the most recent, “Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait,” was published in 2013.