Most College Head Chaplains are Christian. At USC, a Hindu Leads the Way.
The Los Angeles Times’s Rosanna Xia profiles Varun Soni, a Hindu chaplain who is the dean of religious life at the University of Southern California. Xia points out that when Soni was hired in 2008, he was the only head chaplain at a major American university who was not an ordained Christian. “Soni’s approach centers more on commonality than God,” Xia writes. He told her, “My concern is that as students leave traditional religious congregations, they haven’t been taught how to build an intentional community of like-minded people in a way that creates empathy and compassion and a sense of belonging.”