Soni is an unusual college chaplain. He is a Hindu. He has a law degree. In 2008, when USC hired him as its dean of religious life, he was the sole head chaplain at a major American university who was not only not a Christian but not an ordained Christian at that. Today, at a time when differences — religious and otherwise — grow ever more fraught and complex, he remains all but alone in breaking the Protestant chaplain mold, except for a rabbi at Dartmouth, another at Wesleyan, a Buddhist at Emerson.
“It's very, very hard to divorce the pomp and circumstances of academia from particularly Protestant traditions,” said Dena Bodian, president of the National Assn. of College and University Chaplains. “Chaplains like Varun enable us all to rethink what chaplaincy in higher ed could look like.”
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