He has been profiled on 60 Minutes, featured in The New Yorker and now http://toronto.bluejays.mlb.com/team/player.jsp?player_id=285079#gameType='R'§ionType=career&statType=2&season=2013&level='ALL' has an honorary degree from the University of Toronto.

And that’s just this past month for the erudite knuckleballer.

Dickey’s latest off-field honour came Monday when he was awarded an honorary doctorate of “Sacred Letters” from Wycliffe College, U of T’s Anglican theological school, during their graduate ceremony at Convocation Hall.

Dickey, an evangelical Christian whose 2012 bestselling autobiography Wherever I Wind Up detailed not only his remarkable roller coaster of a baseball career, but also the sexual abuse he suffered as a child, was recognized for his outspoken devotion to his faith and his charitable work.

“I gotta say the way the Blue Jays have been playing early on this year, it’s nice to come to a place that abounds with grace,” Dickey said, to many laughs from the audience.

The afternoon’s festivities, while appropriately reverential, also took on something of a ballpark feel, as the college’s principal, Rev. George R. Sumner, mixed in a few baseball metaphors into his opening address, including a reference to Jesus Christ as “the starter and closer of our faith.”

One graduate drew laughs for getting Dickey to sign a ball before she knelt before Chancellor Michael Wilson to have her degree conferred.

Peter Patterson, who introduced Dickey, called him a “powerful example of someone who has made himself personally vulnerable in proclaiming God’s grace in his life,” commending him as “the fluent, thoughtful voice in the media with perspective well beyond the arena in which he performs so well.”

“In all of this R.A. seeks to glorify not himself, but his Lord,” Patterson said.

This offseason Dickey, 38, travelled with his two daughters to Mumbai, India, to deliver a cheque for $100,000 to Bombay Teen Challenge, a Christian missionary group that fights sex slavery in the country. Dickey raised the money — which was used to convert a brothel into a clinic in Mumbai’s red-light district — by climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2012.

In a 15-minute speech to graduates, Dickey spoke of his trip to Mumbai and also of the time almost seven years ago when he contemplated suicide.

“I found myself in the fall of 2006 at the steering wheel of a car with all the windows rolled up and a garden hose attached from the muffler to the passenger-side window in the hopes of ending it all ... I was in that place and I was about to turn the key and I really felt the Holy Spirit saying, ‘R.A., I’m not done with you yet. Don’t do that.’ Like literally those words: ‘Do not do that.’ And so as lonely as I felt in that moment at the steering wheel of a Chevrolet Cavalier, I never felt truly alone.”

He spoke of the solace he found in his faith and called on the graduates to carry out a Christian mission.

“If we’re really going to be candid here, this life is about changing other lives; it’s about introducing people to the hope of Christ,” he said.

In addition to Dickey, the college also conferred honorary degrees to Jenn Harold of World Vision International and the Right Reverend Dr. Grant LeMarquand, Anglican bishop of Egypt and the Horn of Africa.

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Dickey next takes the mound for the Jays on Wednesday against Barry Zito and the San Francisco Giants.

To read Dickey’s entire speech go to thestar.com/sports.

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