As we approach Commencement, YDS is sharing profiles of some of our graduating students. Photos and text by John Curtis.
- Ellen VanDyke Bell ‘25 M.A.R.
- Tim Bergeland ’25 M.Div.
- Sunny McMillan ’25 M.Div.
- Mary Elizabeth Marquardt ‘25 M.A.R.
- Morenike Oyebode ’25 M.Div.
- Reginald Payne ’25 M.A.R.
- Antonio Vargas ‘25 M.Div.
- Mayella Vasquez ‘25 M.A.R.
Ellen VanDyke Bell ‘25 M.A.R.
When Ellen VanDyke Bell was seven years old, she told her family that she was going to be a lawyer. “I wanted to be like Perry Mason because he stood up for people who could not stand up for themselves.”
True to her word, she did indeed become a lawyer. But now, as she prepares for ordination as a rabbi, she sees profound intersecting values in the foundational texts of faith and law. “I preached in class recently, and I was able to combine what the Constitution says with what the Holy Scripture says, in terms of how we’re supposed to treat ‘the stranger’ or one another in general. I think it’s important to talk to people from both angles—some may not follow a particular faith tradition, but we all have values and, hopefully, conscience. When you see injustice, what are you required to do? Remain silent, or say something and do something?”
That convergence came to her after a career as an Assistant District Attorney in the Manhattan D.A.’s Office, Principal Law Clerk for the Administrative Judge for the Criminal Division of New York County Supreme Court, and Assistant Law Professor at Northern Illinois University. She moved to Danbury, Conn., where she became a Magistrate, presiding over small claims and some criminal matters throughout Connecticut. She also started a general law practice, handling a diversity of cases and representing clients in areas including, but not limited to, family law, where she represented children, parents, and individuals with intellectual or physical disabilities. “Being in these positions allowed me to see the world differently and to have a greater understanding and greater compassion for all people. Advocating for those who could not advocate for themselves has always been at the heart of my existence—that’s why I became an attorney in the first place. Looking back, I can see it was all preparing me for the work I am called to do today.”
At that time, she also reconnected with her mother’s Jewish heritage during a Passover seder. “It just resonated with me, and I was like, I have to study this more. I’ve always known that I had Jewish blood in me, I just didn’t practice the faith.” As she completes her M.A.R. studies at YDS, she says, “I see our obligation to people differently, and as a rabbi, that insight is definitely going to help me to be a better rabbi and a better preacher.”
While at YDS, she launched Unapologetically Jewish to dispel stereotypes about Jews. “I said to one of my Christian colleagues, what you learned about a Jew you learned from other Christians. Why don’t you learn about a Jew from a Jew? The mission of Unapologetically Jewish is to build bridges and address anti-Semitism.”
To that end, Unapologetically Jewish has held events around Jewish holidays and invited non-Jews, including a Hanukkah party at YDS. Over a meal of traditional Hanukkah foods, Jewish classmates explained the meaning of their holiday traditions. “A lot of non-Jews were just like, wow, I didn’t know that, I didn’t really know what Hanukkah was about.”
She’s currently a rabbinical intern at Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden and after graduation will spend the summer in clinical pastoral education at Danbury Hospital. “I don’t know what I’m doing after that, whatever the Divine has planned for me.”
Tim Bergeland ’25 M.Div.
After graduating from St. Olaf College in Minnesota in 2018 with a degree in sociology and anthropology, Tim Bergeland spent a year as a Fulbright scholar in Ecuador. He lived with a host family in the Andean highlands and carried out medical anthropology research at an intercultural health clinic that offered patients the choice between Western and Andean indigenous healing modalities. The experience had a profound impact on Tim’s understanding of health: “Behind health is the more expansive question of what it means to be well, and people have approached that question very differently across time and space.”
Upon returning home, Tim found his passion for social justice drawing him to work as a paralegal at an immigration law firm. After a few months, he realized that law was not the right fit for him, and he began to discern what could be next — but the COVID pandemic stymied his search for a path in life. Social isolation took a toll, rendering him depressed and unable to think clearly: “It was like the rug had been pulled out from underneath me.” The healing Tim sought was sparked by something unexpected — not by any individual change he had made to his lifestyle, but by a tender conversation with a beloved friend. “I felt called to be honest with her and openly name my despair. It was a phone call, but it was as if she was right next to me, giving me a hug. The compassion she exuded was so powerful. After that, I had similar conversations with family members and friends, and the love that they gave me didn’t just feel like a nice thing, it actually felt sacred and holy. And so in their love, I felt God’s love.”
In college he’d approached theology on an academic rather than a spiritual level, but the encouragement and care he’d received from loved ones made his calling clear. “As I began to heal, I realized that I wanted nothing more than to be a compassionate presence for other people who are hurting, and I want to do ministry and preach the Gospel as I had lived it and experienced it.”
He began thinking about divinity school and sought counsel from his childhood pastor at his hometown Lutheran Church near Minneapolis: “She told me, ‘Tim, your youth director and I had been waiting for this day when you would tell us that you’re going into ministry. We knew this was coming.’” Tim sees now how his call to ministry was already nascent and emerging in his younger years. “When I look back at my childhood and adolescence, I recognize that I’ve always been concerned with dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. I felt drawn to people who didn’t fit in, and I wanted everyone around me to feel like they belong and know that they belong.”
After graduating in May, Tim will do a year-long chaplaincy residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital, to be followed by a year-long internship with the Lutheran Church (ELCA), the final step before ordination.
The love that met Tim during a time of vulnerability continues to serve as a powerful foundation for his ministry: “I want my ministry to be a love letter to those who showed up for me and illuminated the sacred power of grace.”
Sunny McMillan ’25 M.Div.
Sunny McMillan was practicing law in Texas when she took stock of her life and realized she needed a change. She’d checked all the right boxes—college, law school, marriage, career, financial security—but something was missing. “It lacked meaning and happiness that I thought came with all that stuff.”
Growing up on a thoroughbred farm in East Texas, she’d embraced her dad’s philosophy. “If you do what you love, the money and the work will take care of itself.” So she followed her interests and studied French and Spanish at Baylor. “After undergraduate education, certain things seemed more important than following my heart. So I started to cave into that cultural pressure to do things that are respectable and successful. And law was a field that, to me, carried respect in our culture.”
After deep soul searching, she left her career and marriage to embark on a spiritual journey. “When I had that spiritual practice, that foundation dialed in. I’m not saying it was perfect and everything in my life always fell into place easily, but I knew that I was where I was supposed to be.”
Her journey led her to books and talks by Harvard-trained sociologist Dr. Martha Beck, then to a nine-month life coach training with Beck. She also moved to Seattle, where she discovered a small alternative AM radio station that was seeking hosts for its shows and offered her a weekly slot.
“I was going through coach training with Martha and learning about all these teachers and these modalities and these sciences that were just fascinating, and I wanted to bring these to a larger audience. Every week I interviewed a different author, teacher, scientist, or researcher about some aspect of mind, body, or spirit wellness. And it was like its own graduate degree. I learned so much, and it really helped me dial in my own beliefs and practices.”
“Sunny in Seattle” ran for seven years on the station, and ultimately led her to YDS. “I was following breadcrumbs from what I believe to be the Divine.” She wanted to share the lessons of her spiritual practice in an official role. “The light bulb went on when I heard what a Master of Divinity degree was. I’d never heard of divinity school, never heard of a Master of Divinity degree, but someone I interviewed had that in their bio, and I just knew that was where I was to be next.”
After graduation in May, she plans to seek ordination in Unitarian Universalism, drawn to it by its pluralism. “I identify as someone who sees wisdom in many traditions, and Christianity is one of those, but it’s not the only one. Unitarian Universalism draws from many sources, our own direct experiences of transcending mystery and wonder, to any of the wisdom or religious traditions.”
She plans to return to the Pacific Northwest and pursue ministry in a parish or congregational setting.
Mary Elizabeth Marquardt ‘25 M.A.R.
When Mary Elizabeth Marquardt was a seventh grader at the Atlanta Girls School, Democratic activist and politician Stacey Abrams spoke at an all-school assembly. “She talked about electoral politics, she talked about writing romance novels, she talked about bipartisanship and community,” Marquardt says. Inspired by Abrams’ persistence as a Democrat in a largely Republican state, Marquardt went on to work on Abrams’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign and was a field organizer for the Democrats in the 2020 presidential election.
What drives Marquardt is her passion to make the world a better place. She attributes that to the Atlanta Girls School and her parents’ example. The now-defunct school, which prepared girls from sixth through 12th grades for lives of purpose, “made me the person, the scholar, and hopefully, the servant that I am.”
Her parents (her dad’s an employment lawyer and her mom, a sociologist, is a scholar-in-residence in theology at Emory University) were active in immigrants’ rights. “Some of my earliest memories are of marches for the DREAM Act in 2008.”
An early foray into social justice came during high school when she was an intern for the Atlanta Hawks pro basketball team. She worked on DEI and corporate social responsibility. “I knew then that they were both things that I anticipated committing myself to long term.” She also loves sports—she played basketball in high school and plays on the YDS intramural team.
While she was an undergraduate at Princeton, a summer internship landed her in the office of the deputy attorney general in Washington in 2022. During her first week the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, and in her last week the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago in search of classified documents. “It was a really interesting time. I saw civil servants around me who dedicated themselves to making this country a better place.”
At YDS, she’s finishing a year-long term as president of student government, where one of her main achievements is making funding for student groups more accessible.
When she graduates in May, she expects to start a doctoral program at Emory, picking up on research from her student thesis at Princeton. There she studied relationships between Christian schools and the state in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court ruling mandating the desegregation of public schools in the South. A white flight to private and religious schools ensued, and Marquardt plans to continue her research into Catholic schools that in later years were the first to desegregate. “Many of them were de facto segregated. Many of them were de jure segregated. But the bishops that I studied in Atlanta and Charleston and Birmingham and New Orleans were among some of the first to desegregate their elementary schools.”
Long term, she sees herself in academia. “I would love to teach in whatever capacity that might be, but because of my strong ties to politics and electoral work, I would hope to see myself as a historian doing outward facing work with students and with my own scholarship, trying to make it accessible.”
Morenike Oyebode ’25 M.Div.
In her third year at Hampton University, Morenike Oyebode heard a speaker from Teach for America. It shifted her life’s course. From the age of eight she’d wanted to be a lawyer. But during that talk at Hampton, she heard a startling statistic showing a high dropout rate among Black and brown students. “I started crying in the class,” Morenike says, “and I said I have to do something about it.”
She signed up for Teach for America and spent two years in Greenville, South Carolina, teaching third and fourth graders. During the early days of the covid pandemic, she taught via Zoom, which provided a glimpse of her students’ home lives. Most were students of color, and many were children of immigrants. Thanks to Zoom she learned where they lived, who they lived with, and whether they had pets and siblings.
“I started picking up on little things that I probably wouldn’t have known, and I think that that was to my benefit, being a first-year teacher with no experience, no background, no anything.”
She’d become a teacher knowing it wasn’t the totality of her life’s calling but believing the experience would help her on her path in law. “I wanted to be a lawyer for people who looked like me.” Her plan was to spend two gap years teaching before entering law school, but questions about right and wrong led her first to divinity school.
Growing up on Long Island and in New Jersey, she’d been exposed to several religious traditions. Her father, an immigrant from Nigeria, was Episcopalian. Her mother grew up Baptist but switched to a Pentecostal church. In her early school days, Oyebode attended a Seventh Day Adventist elementary school and public schools before switching to a Catholic school. But none of those traditions answered to her satisfaction the question that brought her to divinity school. What is sin? “The things being labeled as sin didn’t make sense to my understanding of God, because these so-called sinful people were the kindest people that I’ve ever met.”
And that brought her to the intersection of law and religion. “Who gets to benefit from the law, who is suffering under the law? I had these questions in the church, but they’re also questions of the law of society.”
As Oyebode awaits acceptance to law school, she’s also thinking about ministry. She hasn’t yet chosen a denomination and is still working through the meaning of faith. “Through conversations with other students—critiquing the Bible, questioning the Bible, holding on to truths that we know from the Bible—I’ve recognized that everyone has questions. I need to do the wrestling and the questioning, and I need to have conversations with people who are also doing that wrestling and questioning, so that we have an understanding together of who God is.”
“There are tools that I’ve gathered in my teaching experience, tools that I’ve gathered here in divinity school, and tools that I will gather in law school to do the work that I want to do. I want to make sure that policies are fair and just for marginalized people.”
Reginald Payne ’25 M.A.R.
Reginald Payne was six years old when he sang his first solo at the Langley Avenue Church of God in the South Side of Chicago. He doesn’t recall the title of the song, but the lyrics have stayed with him. “My father is rich with houses and lands. He holds the world in his hands, rubies and diamonds, silver, and gold. Just tell him I’m a child again.”
According to his mother, an elementary school teacher who sang in the church choir, he’d been making music since he was three. “She says it started out just banging on pots, but my mother would wake up in the middle of the night and I would have her choir robe on, and I would be conducting to the walls.”
At YDS, he’s still conducting, but with a real choir. Over the past 18 months, he’s been a co-director, conductor, singer, and accompanist for the Yale Black Seminarians Gospel Choir. The choir has performed at Yale and in venues throughout New Haven, often with Yale and community groups. They’ve sung at the Saint Thomas More Chapel downtown and at the Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden.
Although he’s always loved music and learned at an early age to play the piano, when it came time for college, he felt he lacked the preparation to major in music. Instead, he studied advertising at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His first job out of college was working in communications for a school district’s adult education program.
“I got passionate about students who are outside traditional ages in college.” He went back to UIUC for a master’s in education, education policy, organization, and leadership and then landed a job as an academic advisor in the Department of Bioengineering. “It was a high learning curve. I was like, oh, what’s a wet lab?” He liked working with students, but music still called to him, so he began working towards a Ph.D. in education—again at UIUC—to study music education practices in higher ed. Then he discovered musicology and signed up for a master’s program in that as well.
A journal paper by Braxton Shelley, a Yale theorist of African American sacred music, brought Payne back to his roots. “It was an ethnographic article on gospel music and what he calls the sacramentality of sound. The ethnography was set in the South Side of Chicago, at a church that not only have I been to, but where I went to school.”
At a musicology conference in New Orleans, Payne met with Shelley over coffee, and Shelley encouraged him to apply to YDS for a master’s in religion and music. Payne’s interests lean towards Black sacred music. “It does encompass spirituals, including traditional and contemporary gospels, but it also encompasses inspirational music. It may not have an explicit mention of God or Jesus, but the idea is still sharing the light.”
This fall, Payne will start a doctoral program at the Institute of Sacred Music. His next step? “Then I want to be a professor of music.”
Antonio Vargas ‘25 M.Div.
During his time at YDS, Antonio Vargas has also been a TA for courses in philanthropy and nonprofit strategy at the School of Management. “I’ve always been a bit of a business leadership and management nerd,” he says. But understanding how organizations work, he believes, can help him pursue a career that includes church leadership at a time of declining participation in religion.
“One of the reasons I believe people are exiting the church is this profound disconnection between our stated beliefs and our lived experiences,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense for me to preach or believe in a God of Sabbath if I, as a manager or a leader, am not building workplace policies that offer a fair, livable wage to all employees so that they don’t have to work two or three jobs.”
His path to faith began in New London, Conn., where his parents met after emigrating from Puerto Rico. There they’d been mountainside farmers by day and Pentecostal ministers by night. In New London they joined a Baptist church with a diverse, largely immigrant congregation. Worshipers hail from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, and the Virgin Islands.
“In my time there, 20-something years,” Vargas says of his church, “I’ve been able to see the way in which it’s not only served the community spiritually, but practically.” It renamed itself Church of the City and offered worship services in English as well as Spanish, started a program to help first-gen students enter and succeed in college, and launched an immigration advocacy support center. The church became a welcoming second family for Vargas, whose home life was rooted in spirituality. “We would pray together daily, memorize scripture, but also take time to read the Bible together.”
His late father was a welder and mechanic for the city of New London, and his mother works in the medical field as a project manager helping people access the health care system, such as undocumented immigrants or people recently released from incarceration.
After Vargas graduated from Gordon College, his church invited him to be their pastor. The post landed him at the nexus of education, congregational leadership, and organizational behavior. In the fall of 2025, he’s entering the M.A.R. program at YDS, to continue pursuing those interests and his plans to take on a leadership role in theological education. He’s still navigating his path and believes in the importance of local churches like the one in his hometown. “I care deeply for the local church, whether that is in a pastoral role or not. Do I see myself as a pastor forever? Probably not, but I do see myself committed to the local church.”
Mayella Vasquez ‘25 M.A.R.
Mayella Vasquez grew up in Calexico, near San Diego, in a Catholic family. As an undergraduate, she attended the University of San Diego, a Catholic school, and majored in English. “I learned a lot about how values and virtue need to be put into action,” she says, “for there to be some sort of alignment with Jesus’s mission on earth.” After college, she lived her faith during a year in Nashville with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. She received room and board and a weekly stipend in a program that focused on four values: simplicity, social justice, prayer, and community.
“It was a transformative experience because it gave me a chance to think about the issues I cared about,” she says. “I worked in legal aid for migrant farmers around the South. I would travel and tell them about their rights.”
Some workers came from South Africa, but most were from Latin America. She saw firsthand their living conditions, which often meant housing with bedbugs or no AC in the South’s blistering summer heat. “There’s no law that says fix the facilities.”
She’d gone to USD thinking of a career in human rights law but found English and creative writing “more fun.” While studying at YDS, she became a storytelling associate at Tsai City, Yale’s innovation hub, and got involved in hackathons. She’s working on a project to create a flip phone that connects to AI software that can provide medical information to mothers in underserved areas. She has volunteered at New Haven’s Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen and at the now-shuttered Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, helping people find jobs.
“I came here to learn world religions more than Christianity, because I want to know where we all come from and what we’re thinking about. I think when you’re trying to come up with solutions, it’s helpful to know what’s the moral background that a society could have.”
Her work at Tsai City has led her to believe that through entrepreneurship she can help find solutions to weighty social problems. One project she worked on was to create for-profit housing that could also fund affordable homes. “At the moment, I’m trying to solve the problems I was meant to solve and the way I was meant to solve them.” And that could take her back to her hometown, where her dad is a planner for the town and her mom works in an olive mill. Calexico, she says, “has a lot of environmental issues. It’s very polluted and has really high asthma rates. I think that maybe the things I’m learning in the entrepreneurial space might eventually be what I would like to do in my community.”
She’s still thinking through her plans following graduation in May. “I’m trying to use all the skills I have and do good with them, trying to make the most impact possible in my own way. I didn’t know that I cared about entrepreneurship as much as I did. This is about using business to make the world a better place.”