Reverend Vernon T. Sarver Jr. (STH ’71)
This obituary was originally posted by Hodges Family Funeral Home and can be found here.
Vernon “Bunny” Thomas Sarver, Jr. 1943-2023, of Ridge Manor, FL, died on Wednesday, May 31. He was 79. He is preceded in death by his beloved wife of 39 years, Mary Duran Sarver. He is also preceded by his father, Vernon Thomas Sarver, Sr., and his mother, Dorothea Ellis Sarver. He is survived by his daughters, Anne Marie Januario of Lutz, FL, and Laura-Edythe Sarver Coleman of Philadelphia, PA; and grandchildren Daniel, Ezekiel, Zachariah, Ezra, Mateus, and Kaio. He is also survived by his sister and brother Viki Bower of Gulf Breeze, FL, and Thomas Sarver of Raleigh, NC, respectively.
Vernon received his bachelor’s degree from Florida State University, Tallahassee in 1966. He earned a Master of Divinity, Tufts University, 1969; Master of Sacred Theology, Boston University, 1971; Master of Arts in Philosophy, Ohio State University, 1976. In 1994, he was awarded the degree, Doctor of Philosophy, from the University of Florida, Gainesville. Throughout his life, he was a competitive chess player, registered as a Life Certified Expert with the United States Chess Federation. He was a member of the American Philosophical Association and delighted in philosophy, classical writings in Greek such as Aristotle, Plato, and Homer. In his later years, he further developed his love of mathematics, publishing his “Heronian Proofs of The Pythagorean Theorem” in The Alabama Journal of Mathematics (2004).
Over the course of his professional career, he was a dedicated educator, researcher, and author. He was a retired public-school teacher, whose career spanned nearly four decades and concluded as a teacher of gifted, at Marion County Schools, Ocala, Florida, where he taught for 24 years. He was an Adjunct instructor at Florida Junior College, Jacksonville, 1979-1981, Lake City (Florida) Community College, 1981-1983, St. Leo College, Ocala, Florida, 1994-2000, and the University of South Florida, Lakeland, 2009-2010. Most recently, he was a Fellow in the Center for Social and Political Thought at the University of South Florida, 2001-2022. His principal area of research in recent years has been in the milieu of social contract theory and the legal abolition of the death penalty, with articles on Hobbes, Locke, and Kant appearing in the Journal of Philosophical Research, the British Journal of American Legal Studies, and the Journal of Value Inquiry, respectively. He spent the majority of his adult life contributing to the abolition of the death penalty, providing the philosophical and rational basis for a change within our society. His final article on the topic, “Abolishing the Death Penalty: An Untested Legal Argument” was published in The American Journal of Criminal Justice (2014). He was, as his departed wife would say, part of “the fabric of society.”
He will be laid to rest next to his wife in the Garden of the Prophets, Chapel Hill Gardens.