Home / Summer 2011 / The Un-Chaplain

The Un-Chaplain

A Hindu and Buddhist by avocation, a comparative religion scholar by training, a lawyer and entrepreneur by trade, Varun Soni brings new meaning to the phrase ‘faith-based initiative.’

The only non-ordained, non-Christian university dean of religious life in the United States.

Here’s something you probably didn’t know: Since 2008, the primary spiritual leader at USC has been a 36-year-old, Indian-born lawyer named Varun Soni. Not Reverend Soni. Not Father Soni. Just plain Varun, no honorific necessary. Soni is no clergyman. “I’m a non-ordained Hindu attorney,” he says with a sheepish grin. OK, it’s not as random as it sounds. In addition to his J.D. from UCLA, Soni holds master’s degrees in comparative world religions from Harvard Divinity School and from UC Santa Barbara. His bachelor’s degree, from Tufts University, is in religion and Asian studies. And he earned a Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Still, Soni acknowledges that his appointment is a little bizarre. He’s the only non-ordained, non-Christian university dean of religious life in the United States. Reflect a little, however, and it makes perfect sense. Los Angeles is, after all, the most religiously diverse place on the planet. According to research by John Orr, religion professor emeritus and founding director of USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, more than 600 separate faith communities were operating religious centers in the Southland as of 1999.

USC sits at the crossroads of this incredible religious diversity. Just within a square mile of the University Park campus are 70 houses of worship. And the number is continually growing. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, perhaps the world’s most famous Hindu leader, recently opened the Los Angeles headquarters of his Art of Living Foundation in the iconic domed structure a few blocks from campus that was the former Second Church of Christ, Scientist.

This religious diversity doesn’t just envelop USC. It permeates it. “We oversee more student religious groups and more campus religious directors than any school in the country,” notes Soni. “We have 90 groups, and 40 campus religious directors.”

From Atheist to Zoroastrian, 13 major traditions are listed at the USC Office of Religious Life website. (That’s right. In USC’s pluralistic universe, the Secular Alliance historically has been certified as a religious group. According to its mission, it “seeks to bring together those whose beliefs and moral principles are grounded in rational thought.”) The list of major traditions also includes Jain, Sikh, Baha’i, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Falun Gong, Pagan/Wiccan and, of course, Christian – which comes in more than 50 varieties.

Some of this diversity is related to another Trojan hallmark. USC has the highest foreign enrollment of any American university: nearly 8,000 international students during the 2009-10 academic year, according to the most recent Open Doors report of the Institute of International Education. All told, 110 countries are represented in USC’s study body, the largest populations being Indian (1,623) and Chinese (1,428).

So in a way, it doesn’t matter what religion Soni practices, or whether he’s ordained, because USC’s dean of religious life isn’t an advocate for any one religion. He is an advocate for religious pluralism and interfaith harmony.

Unique as Soni is among university spiritual leaders, he follows in a pioneering USC tradition. His predecessor, Rabbi Susan Laemmle, was the first non-Christian chief religious officer of an American university. “She was the first, and I’m the second – so USC made two historic back-to-back hires,” Soni grins.

Religion professor Donald Miller, who served on the committee that selected Soni, recalls a field of candidates who were hard to tell apart: hundreds of campus ministers with theological degrees. And then there was Varun.

“He was the standout: extremely different from what one might expect from a dean of religious life,” says Miller, who directs the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture. These differences turned out to be assets. “The fact that Varun represents personally a tradition that is itself extremely pluralistic, as Hinduism is, helps him really understand pluralism on a university campus.”

Even so, appointing him required a leap of faith.

At the time, Soni was teaching full time in UC Santa Barbara’s undergraduate Law and Society Program. In his spare time, he produced and hosted a monthly radio show on South Asian music for KPFK. He was also an entrepreneur, nursing along two fledging enterprises: one, a graphic novel business; the other, an India-based legal document service providing immigration support for customers such as Microsoft.

On the academic side, Soni was finishing up his dissertation in the funky field of religion and pop culture. His topic: the relationship between religious prophecy and recording technology, with special focus on reggae icon Bob Marley and Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Soni hopes to turn the dissertation, which he completed in 2010, into a book.

The graphic novel business – a collaboration with film producer Deepak Nayar (of Bend it Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice fame) – will debut its first title late this year, published and released by Houghton Mifflin. Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary, by Keshni Kashyap, is a satirical look at the foibles, adventures and coming of age of an Indian-American high-school girl growing up in the beach cities of Southern California. More graphic novels will follow.

The immigration legal service business flourishes, although Soni ended his involvement when he joined USC. The radio show also ended, but Soni – a passionate world-music buff – has turned his attention to the task of saving vulnerable audio collections. For example, he is supporting Miller and the USC Libraries to establish an archive of oral histories documenting the lives of African-American gospel artists.

In a related project with USC communications scholar Josh Kun, Soni hopes to bring to USC several privately held music collections, including the largest reggae music archive in the world, an outstanding Sufi music archive, a rare collection of anthropological and ethnographic recordings from across Latin America and Africa, and a collection of field recordings of Buddhist chanting and Balinese rituals from the 1960s and 70s.

The current state of musical preservation in the United States is dismal, says Kun, noting that last fall the Library of Congress released a comprehensive study showing that major areas of America’s recorded sound heritage are disappearing. Only 14 percent of pre-1965 commercial recordings remain publicly accessible, the study found. As vintage record stores close and record labels go out of business, the  race is on to salvage the physical back catalogues of LPs and master tapes.

“When I went to college, I had a number of experiences’ that transformed the trajectory of my life, put me on a different path. What I’m doing now, I really planted the seeds for during my college years. I always tell our students to think about that: ‘The seeds you plant here at USC are going to blossom and grow in the next 10 years, and they’re going to shape your life. So be conscientious of how you use your time here.’”

“Varun and I are both big music fans and very eager to see what USC’s role can be in pioneering forward-thinking archival steps to make sure these valuable collections don’t get lost,” says Kun. “We’re here in Southern California, the hub of the music world, and we think we can play a really important role.”

Music collector, law professor, graphic novel publisher, legal services entrepreneur – just who is this restless polymath currently holding the position of dean of religious life?

Even though Soni was born in Kanpur, India’s fifth largest city, he is thoroughly American. His parents were already established physicians living in New York City when they visited their homeland so that his mother could give birth surrounded by her family. Baby Varun was 7 weeks old when the Soni family returned to the United States for good. When he was 10, they left the East Coast and settled in Orange County.

Being a South Asian teen in the OC was confusing. Soni’s parents were part of the first wave of Indian immigrants to come under the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. “My generation was the first to really think about what it meant to be Hindu-American or Indian-American,” Soni says. “We didn’t have a lot of people around us to help us think through those issues.”

Their parents weren’t much help. High-achiever professionals from India’s elite caste, they were largely secular and gung-ho on American assimilation. “We weren’t raised speaking Hindi or going to temple,” says Soni. “We were raised playing basketball and soccer and piano. I grew up on McDonald’s.”

The decisions to become vegetarian and to abstain from alcohol weren’t cultural or religious, but classic Gen-X American: “I don’t eat meat because I have seen how meat is manufactured in this country,” he says, “and I don’t drink alcohol because it puts me to sleep.” It was only after he graduated from Corona del Mar High School and went away to college that Soni was immersed in Hindu religion and culture.

Though he had grown up listening to his parents speak Hindi and Punjabi, Soni never learned to read or write – much less converse – in his ancestral tongues. Until he started taking Asian studies courses at Tufts, that is. It was in religion classes that he first encountered the sacred texts of his forefathers. His senior honors thesis was on the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna and his notion of sunyata, or emptiness. “In a way,” says Soni, “I learned about my Indian culture and my religious identity in a Western research university.”

Yet Soni firmly believes – and his own experience has borne this out – that truly transformational college learning happens outside the classroom. A semester-abroad experience during his junior year brought him to a Buddhist monastery in the Indian village of Bodh Gaya, where he “took refuge” with a Tibetan rinpoche (respected teacher). Taking Buddhist vows, Soni notes, is not incompatible with Hinduism. The two faiths “come from the same Indian philosophical paradigm,” he explains. “I consider the Dalai Lama to be one of my spiritual teachers, so I’m a Hindu with a Buddhist mentor. I don’t see that as contradictory.”

The five basic Buddhist vows, incidentally, required Soni not to lie, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, consume intoxicants or commit violence. The first four were easy, but the last one was an ordeal. “We were there during monsoon season,” he explains, and the mosquitoes were out in force. The non violent response to that high, thin whine, he discovered, is to gently blow on the tiny insect until it moves along in search of other prey.

Soni persevered and gradually achieved “very profound experiences of meditation where I was able to understand the Buddhist tradition of contemplation as getting past ego.”

The transformational moment came unexpectedly. “It was Sunday morning, Oct. 2, 1994,” he recalls. “Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. It’s a big day in India. And I’m in Bodh Gaya, meditating under the tree where the Buddha was enlightened. It is considered the center of the Buddhist universe. I hear a commotion behind me, so I look over, and coming toward me is the Dalai Lama. Every time he’s in this area, he’ll come pay his respects.”

The Tibetan holy man  proceeded to lead Soni and some 20 disciples into a morning meditation. Later, Soni had a conversation with the Dalai Lama. “I could just tell by his demeanor, the twinkle in his eye, his laugh, that what I had briefly experienced – trying to awaken my inner mind – was something he was constantly experiencing,” says Soni, who has attended the Dalai Lama’s public speeches more than 50 times since then. “It was a marriage of the theoretical and the actual at the moment.” (He of course plans to welcome His Holiness, the Dalai Lama to USC on May 3.)

Other transformational moments were sadder and far more universal. In Soni’s senior year, a serious romantic relationship ended and a close friend died in a mountain-climbing accident. “What those two experiences taught me is that love is impermanent and life is impermanent. To lose a girlfriend and then to lose a dear friend, I felt more suffering than I’d ever felt before.”

He eventually bounced back. Five years ago, he met his soul mate: a South African military doctor specializing in HIV/AIDS care. They found each other in a bar in Rio de Janeiro, of all unlikely places, and were soon deep in conversation about Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “It was the best 20-minute conversation I had ever had,” Soni recalls. The couple married in 2007; Shakti Soni currently is doing her pediatric residency at LAC+USC Medical Center.

At age 36, he still keeps the memories of college and its transformational moments fresh in his mind. And this helps him identify with the students he comforts, counsels and sometimes must reprimand in his job at USC.

“This is a remarkable university for reconciliation and engagement. It’s tolerant, it’s engaged, it’s respectful. You have instances of bias that I’m aware of, but those are, more often than not, learning opportunities for students, rather than anything with malicious intent.”

Soni sees remarkable potential in today’s youth. Research show that Millennials – those born after 1982 – are the first generation in our nation’s history to list “meaning” as one of their top goals in their careers. It’s also the most multicultural, multifaith and multidisciplinary generation in American history, according to Soni.

“Our students are good at making things work for them,” he says. “Taking values or religious faith that their parents have given to them and approaching them in a creative way that makes sense for them. They’re less interested in dogma and doctrine, and more interested in community service and religious experience.”

However, questions of spiritual meaning and religious faith rarely come up in the classroom, nor should they in a secular research university. That’s where the Office of Religious Life can help.

“What I love about this job is that it’s really about out-of-the-classroom pedagogy. And the reality is, my experiences and background are very similar to those of our students,” Soni says. “When I went to college, I had a number of experiences that transformed the trajectory of my life, put me on a different path. What I’m doing now, I really planted the seeds for during my college years. I always tell our students to think about that: ‘The seeds you plant here at USC are going to blossom and grow in the next 10 years, and they’re going to shape your life. So be conscientious of how you use your time here.’”