USC Religion

May 09

Congratulations, TAK Initiates!

Congratulations to USC’s newest members of Theta Alpha Kappa (TAK), the National Honors Society for Religious Studies and Theology! We were happy to initiate four new members this past Tuesday, at a special dinner held at the University Club.

New members include Kausar Ali, Grant Dixon, Adeel Mohammadi, and Jayme Tsutsuse. Karissa Masciel, who is studying abroad this term, is a continuing member of TAK. She was initiated last year.

I hope you will join us in congratulating our accomplished majors! 

For those of you wishing to join TAK in the future, the requirements are as follows: (1) completion of at least 12 units of REL studies courses; (2) a GPA of at least 3.5 in REL courses; (3) an overall GPA of at least 3.0. We will hold another initiation ceremony in the spring of 2014.

TAK also publishes a journal featuring student writing twice per year. Past issues of the journal can be found in the ACB lounge.

Department Chair Duncan Williams and Director of Undergraduate Studies Lori Meeks with new TAK members Adeel Mohammadi, Grant Dixon, Kausar Ali, and Jayme Tsutsuse.

May 01

REL Fall 2013 Course Lineup

REL 111g: The World of the Hebrew Bible    Instructor: Zuckerman

The aim of this course is to give a comprehensive introduction to the Hebrew Bible, concentrating on the most central theological issues in all three subdivisions of the scriptures, according to Jewish tradition: the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings. We will focus upon the Bible as the religious document out of which emerged those basic theological concepts that have had a decisive impact on western civilization.  Our particular concern will therefore be biblical ideas about the nature of God, the relationship of the Deity to mankind, and the overall human condition.

REL 137g Introduction to Islam  Instructor: Jackson

This course will provide students with a working knowledge of Islam.  We will begin with Islam’s founder in 7^th century Arabia and move through Muslim history and society making our way all the way up to modern America.  We will end with a discussion of the encounter between Islam and modernity, including some of the challenges facing Islam and Muslims in the post 9-11 world.

REL 301 Introduction to the Study of Religion

Instructor: McHugh

Religions have at times been praised as the path to the reward of heavenly bliss, and blamed as the root of wars and violence. What exactly is this diverse and complicated thing that we call religion? The course will explore a variety of important themes, such as the concept of mysticism and the role of the body in religion. Every week we will introduce some interesting, accessible, and stimulating scholarship on how to approach the study of religion.

REL 329 Themes in the Religions of China

Instructor: Lai

Between roughly 300 B.C. and 600 A.D., practitioners and authors working from within many religious movements and traditions devised practices in China designed to move individuals toward salvation or ultimate religious achievement.  Students will learn a about traditions such as Taoism (also spelled Daoism), Buddhism, and Confucianism, as well as traditional Chinese medicine and other ancient Chinese traditions of spirituality

REL 330 Introduction to the Religions of India

Instructor: Sherma

What is Enlightenment? The Higher Self? Karma? Yoga? 

These and other such words are now common terms in our culture, but where did they come from, and what do they refer to? The purpose of this course is to reflect the rich religious diversity of India by providing a survey of the major religious traditions that emerged in India.

REL 332 Religions of Japan   Instructor: Callahan

When asked “what is your religion?” most Japanese today respond, “I have no religion.” However, we find young children being brought to Shinto shrines to mark their birth, students buying protective charms to ensure their success in exams, young couples opting to have a Christian style wedding, office workers engaging in Zen meditation and Buddhist funerals being performed. This course will focus primarily on the major traditions of Japan: Shinto and Buddhism, with some attention to Confucianism and Christianity.

REL 337/AMST 337 Islam in Black America: From Slavery to Hip Hop  Instructor: Jackson

Of all the major Western democracies, America is unique in that its Muslim community includes large and growing numbers of Black Americans who were born in this country.  While the assumption is that this is a carryover from the slave population, the historical record simply does not bear this out.  How do we explain the rise of Islam in Black America? 

REL 417 Seminar in South Asian Religions:  Sacred Space and Time in Indian Religions   Instructor: McHugh

What exactly is heaven like, and where is it? How many heavens are there? What is the geography of hell? What happens at the creation and periodic destruction of the universe? This course examines questions of space and time in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Using original Indian texts, images, and other media, this seminar style class explores the philosophical nature of time, the structure of the cosmos, the mystical Tantric anatomy of the body, the sacred space of the temple, as well as the holy geography of Indian pilgrimage sites.  No previous knowledge of Indian religions required.

REL 462 Religion and Violence

Instructor: Heft

The “Religion and Violence” seminar examines all the major religions, all of which have followers who have committed acts of violence in the name of their religion.

Is it a problem with the religion, with the interpretation given to the religion, or just an inescapable part of human aggression?

JOUR/REL 484 American Religion, Foreign Policy and the News Media    Instructor: Winston 

From Buddhist and Muslim conflicts in Myanmar to the rise of Pentecostalism in South America to the Arab Spring, religion plays a key role in international events and the subsequent shaping of American foreign policy.

This course explores the relationship between religious movements and international relations to probe the development of American foreign policy and global media coverage.

REL 495 Field Methods and Theories in Archaeology

Instructor: Dodd

While the Indiana Jones movies present a romantic side of archaeology, field work is actually more regimented, systematic, organized and involves a lot less violence (or aliens…). Modern archaeology has been around for over 150 years, and the discipline is considered the most scientific among the social sciences. This class will expose students to some of the central concepts and work methods of the discipline and is designed to whet your appetite.

Apr 23

Fieldwork Scholarships with the American Schools of Oriental Research

The American Schools of Oriental Research provides many summer fieldwork scholarships for undergraduates and grad students. 

Because USC is an institutional member, individual students do not need to be members of ASOR themselves in order to apply. 

Also, ASOR has a new monthly e-newsletter, and students can register without cost. Thereby, they will receive notice of grant application deadlines. 

—from Dr. Swartz

Courses in Buddhist Art History to be offered this fall (one undergraduate and one graduate)

REL Majors and Minors, 

If you are interested in visual culture, art, and Buddhism, please consider Prof. Sonya Lee’s fall course on Buddhist Art and Archaeology. We will be able to offer credit toward the REL major or minor to those who take this course. Contact Prof. Lee (sonyasle@dornsife.usc.edu) if you have any questions about the course. You can also contact Prof. Meeks (meeks@usc.edu) with questions about substitution credit for REL.

And GRADUATE STUDENTS: Please check out Prof. Lee’s graduate seminar on Dunhuang. This would be a great seminar for those interested in Chinese Buddhism, Buddhist Art History, and the History of Buddhist Studies.

AHIS/EALC 381 Visual Cultures of Asia: Buddhist Art and Archaeology

Fall, 2013

Apr 21

Lecture on Korean Buddhism this THURSDAY, 5 pm

CJRC EVENT: Korea’s Jōdōshinshū: Lay Monk Villages in Colonial Korea (1910-1945) [Thursday, April 25]

Thursday
April 25, 2013

CJRC Lecture Series

A lecture by Dr Hwansoo Kim (Duke University) focusing on Korea’s Jōdōshinshū: Lay Monk Villages in Colonial Korea (1910-1945)

Location: East Asian Seminar Room (110C), Doheny Memorial Library, USC
Time: 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Please RSVP by email to cjrc@dornsife.usc.edu

ABSTRACT

A newspaper editorial from 1930s colonial Korea characterized the isolated villages of married Buddhist monks spread across the northern border between Korea and China as “the mystery of the century”. These lay monk villages (K. jaega-seung burak or Jp. zaikeso) existed from the seventeenth century until the 1960s. The males in these villages shaved their heads and had wives and children, and they ranged in number from thousands to tens of thousands at their peak. These lay monks and their families comprised the descendents of the Jurchens, an ethnic group from northern China who migrated to Korea and later mixed with Koreans.

In this presentation, based on previous scholarship and on untapped primary sources, he would like to take up two questions. First, how did these villagers come to take on a monastic identity (or, at minimum, the appellation)? Second, how should we understand the history of these communities within the context of Korean Buddhism? While scholars conventionally understanding the origin of this monastic identity as coincidental and unauthentic, he argues that Korean monks fleeing or relocating as a result of Choson Korea’s anti-Buddhist policies perhaps contributed to the formation of a monastic identity of the males in these villages. Finally, he will address how the Neo-Confucian Choson dynasty, imperial Japan, and North Korean authorities politicized these communities for their own purposes. These lay monk communities were an unusual manifestation of Korean Buddhism and as such force us to consider what, and who, defines Korean Buddhism and monastic.

BIOGRAPHY
Hwansoo Kim, Duke University

Hwansoo Kim is an assistant professor at Duke University in the field of Korean Buddhism and culture with the departments of Religion and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2007, followed by a post-doctoral appointment with the Harvard Reischauer Institute. He then taught Japanese religions as an assistant professor at the University of Arizona. Kim’s most recent article is “A Buddhist Christmas: The Buddha’s Birthday Festival in Colonial Korea (1928–1945).” He is the author of Empire of the Dharma: Korean and Japanese Buddhism, 1877–1912 (Harvard Asia Press, 2012).

More details about him at http://religiondepartment.duke.edu/people?Gurl=/aas/Religion&Uil=hwansoo.kim&subpage=profile

Please RSVP by email to Mieko Araki cjrc@dornsife.usc.edu

Book Talk/Signing with Rev. Jim Burklo, Wed., April 24, 4:30-6:00 pm

BOOK TALK/SIGNING:

HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA: THE WAY OF SOULFUL SERVICE
with author, Rev. Jim Burklo , Associate Dean of Religious Life, USC
4:30-6 pm, Wed April 24
Fishbowl, USC University Religious Center, 835 W 34th St, LA 90089
Available now at amazon.com  <http://www.amazon.com/Hitchhiking-Alaska-Way-Soulful-Service/dp/1937943089/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364427373&sr=1-1&keywords=hitchhiking+burklo>    —-   Books will be available for purchase at the event

How can spiritual practice (whether or not it is formally religious) help me to help others better?
How can I “hang in there” in service, when the going gets tough?
How can I grow in faith through service?
How can I go deeper in helping relationships?

In this guide to soulful service, Jim Burklo draws from his deep well of experience working with homeless people, leading service-learning programs for university students, and pastoring churches.  With touching stories, poetry, and parables, HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA illustrates universal principles about the spirituality of helping relationships.  It shatters facile assumptions about what it means to serve.  It inspires people of all religions, or of no faith affiliation, to aim higher in their works of service.  HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA is recommended reading for anyone in any kind of helping relationship.  It is particularly useful for service-learning professionals and students in secondary and higher education, and for leaders and volunteers in religious congregations and faith-based service organizations.
 
“Jim Burklo’s HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA: The Way of Soulful Service is a must-read for those interested in exploring the intersection between service, learning and meaning-making.  Through stories and thoughtful prose, Burklo offers a loving critique of our common preconceived notions about service and artfully presents a framework for engaging in ethical and meaningful action.  I know of no other person who could better blend deep intellectual explorations with rich spiritual questions through such powerful story telling.  Pick-up the book and begin hitchhiking to a more profound way of seeing service.”     Kent Koth, Director, Center for Service and Community Engagement, Seattle University, and Director, Seattle University Youth Initiative

Apr 19

Introductory Ancient Greek to be offered this fall

Dear Religion Majors and Minors,
I’d like to let you know (if you didn’t know already) that Introductory Ancient Greek is offered at USC by the Department of Classics. Knowledge of Ancient Greek is especially helpful for students interested in studying Early Christianity, the New Testament, connections between Classical antiquity and Islamic thought, and many topics in the philosophy of religion.
The course meets Monday - Thursday from 10-1050 AM. If you would like more information about the course, please contact me at cirillo@usc.edu.

- Dr. Thomas Cirillo
Department of Classics

Apr 17

Prof. Swartz’s “Human Survival” Course Featured in Dornsife College Magazine

Life, Neolithic Style

In a First Year Investigations seminar, “Human Survival: Learning from the Past,” students start a fire, spin wool and smelt copper the way it was done 8,000 years ago. L.A. Weekly selected that course and another FYI seminar among its “Best of L.A. Classes” for 2012.

By Michelle Salzman
April 12, 2013 

categories: undergraduate, faculty diversity

With expert movement, chemistry major Storm Nylen weaved together three long, thin strands of cotton to form a braid. Stationed at a counter in the USC Archaeology Research Center laboratory, she concentrated intently on her work, surrounded by her classmates who were equally engrossed in the task of braiding.

Nylen and her classmates were making wicks for ceramic oil lamps. They hoped their carefully constructed cords would be able to light their way in a darkened room after the sun went down.

The exercise was an assignment for the First-Year Investigations (FYI) seminar “Human Survival: Learning from the Past,” in which students learned what it took to subsist in the Neolithic period approximately 8,000 years ago.  Back then, tools were made from found materials such as stone and obsidian, and the majority of people’s energy was dedicated to fulfilling the needs of everyday life — procuring food, shelter and clothing.

Storm Nylen, a freshman taking the First-Year Investigations (FYI) course “Human Survival: Learning from the Past,” carefully weaves together string to create a wick for her oil lamp. Photo by Michelle Salzman.

How did people survive before electric light and In-N-Out Burger?

Freshmen in “Human Survival” found out by learning to make fire, smelt copper, grind grain and create mud bricks, among other activities. Of making mud bricks, the syllabus warned: “You will get wet, dirty and generally mucky. For those of you with manicures, kiss them goodbye.”

In each two-unit, credit-no credit FYI course, freshmen explore subjects such as Los Angeles literature, Renaissance fashion, evolutional physiology, and medicine in small classroom settings taught by eminent faculty.

“Human Survival” is popular with students, and its creative premise caught the attention of L.A. Weekly, which named the seminar a 2012 “Best of L.A. Classes.” The distinction recognizes the city’s classes that teach life lessons transcending their specific subject matter in imaginative and innovative ways. The FYI course “The Art of Political Bargaining,” taught by Jeb Barnes, associate professor of political science, was also selected as a L.A. Weekly 2012 “Best of L.A. Classes.”

Lynn Swartz Dodd, lecturer in religion and curator of USC’s Archaeology Research Center, housed in USC Dornsife, developed and leads the course. In “Human Survival,” students engage in activities they often take for granted in their daily lives. “They come to appreciate the innovation of the people who lived long ago,” she said.

Lynn Swartz Dodd, lecturer in religion and curator of USC’s Archaeology Research Center, housed in USC Dornsife, shows her students how to use their homespun wicks in an oil lamp, similar to what people did during the Neolithic period 8,000 years ago in order to see in the dark. Photo by Michelle Salzman.

Putting a man on the moon is one thing, but the technological advancements that simplify what we do each day — turning on a faucet for water or grabbing dinner from the refrigerator — are equally remarkable, Dodd said. People in the Neolithic period hunted and fished for their food. They set bits of rock into wooden handles to create tools like sickles that would be used to harvest grain, which they would grind for bread and brew into beer.

“When we wake up, we have food at the ready,” she said. “We flip on a light and suddenly we can see; it doesn’t matter what time of day or night it is. We have a fair distance between us and the original sources of energy and food.

“After someone has spent a couple of hours trying to make cheese, their next cheese burger is eaten with a greater sense of appreciation,” she added with a smile.

Students in her course do, in fact, make cheese, a food staple of the Neolithic period (or New Stone age) that could be stored for future consumption. Her students took the painstaking steps of preparing food the way it was done thousands of years ago.

Divided into teams, each group was given a leg of lamb, a squash and a bowl of grain, then asked to select time-appropriate tools — shards of obsidian for slicing meat or rocks for grinding grain into flour — and turn each item into edible ingredients for cooking. Each team competed to see who could produce the most usable food.

“We cut up entire raw legs of lamb using obsidian chunks, which was difficult, but interesting,” said Wolfgang Paulson, whose major is undecided. “It was very messy.”

Students could also “steal” food from one another, which Dodd called “strategic resource acquisition.” After all, ancient people had to think on their toes to ensure they had a meal in their belly each day.

Students get their hands dirty making mud bricks. Unlike what our ancestors did in the Neolithic period, however, the Trojans here are stamping USC onto each brick.  Photo by Sarah Hawley.

The interdisciplinary course combined elements of art history, microbiology, history, chemistry and material science. Students worked with Karen Koblitz, senior lecturer in ceramics in the USC Roski School of Fine Arts, and fine arts and archaeology student Tim Linden to make pottery including trays to toast grain over a fire, jars for brewing beer, decorative figurines and oil lamps for a light source — the last for which Nylen and her classmates were preparing wicks.

Nylen said learning to survive as her Neolithic ancestors did by replicating their experiences offered her a deeper insight into the past.

“You can read about artifacts and the ways people function all you want,” she said, “but you can’t appreciate, for instance, how difficult it is to ground a reasonable amount of flour until you try and do it yourself.”

As for the wick she wove, Nylen dipped her homespun wick into a lamp she had filled with olive oil, then let the wick soak for a few minutes. She lit the wick. Success! A clear, bright flame appeared.

“The best part of this day was just experiencing this very ancient technology, and seeing how easy and effective it is to use,” Nylen reflected on the class blog.

To read Nylen’s and other students’ reflections on the course and see more photos visit the USC Dornsife archaeology blog Hunter Blatherer.

http://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/1361/life-neolithic-style/

Apr 11

Dr. Peter Williams (Cambridge University) on “How Bible Translation Has Changed,” WED., April 17, 2:00-3:30 pm

Prof. Zuckerman arranged this lecture by Dr. Peter Williams of the Tyndale House Residential Centre for Biblical Research in Cambridge. The talk is entitled “How Bible Translation Has Changed” and will be held on Wednesday, April 17th, from 2-3:30 PM in Hedco 100.

Apr 10

Prof. McHugh Featured in Dornsife College Magazine

Sense and Sensuality

James McHugh, assistant professor of religion in USC Dornsife, has written the first comprehensive study of premodern Indian perfumes within the cultural and philosophical contexts of smell as portrayed in literary texts of the period.

By Susan Bell
April 9, 2013

Uproar, Moon Juice, Outrage and Who’s He? Despite their deceptively avant-garde names, these are in fact medieval Indian perfumes, created and titled almost a thousand years ago at a time when the sense of smell played a crucial role in daily life and religious ritual.

During that period in India, the complex and creative use of aromatics was considered vitally important in enhancing pleasure to achieve an ideal love life. Both kings and gods were honored by adornment with costly and exotic perfumes, pastes and garlands in well-defined ritual practices believed to encourage an auspicious ambience for the granting of political and divine favor.

“Given the diverse nature of smells and their powerful affective potencies, it is only natural that people sought to exploit them to please gods, placate kings and arouse lovers,” explained James McHugh, assistant professor of religion in USC Dornsife, and author of Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture(Oxford University Press, 2012).

McHugh’s highly entertaining study is the first to offer a comprehensive examination of the importance of the concepts and practices related to the material world of perfumes and aromatic raw materials as well as the abstract, philosophical notions of smell portrayed in literary texts of the period.

He wrote the book while at USC with the help of a Society for the Humanities Fellowship on “global aesthetics” awarded by Cornell University. A research grant from USC also allowed him to travel to India to speak to perfumers and gain access to rare Sanskrit manuscripts.

James McHugh, assistant professor of religion in USC Dornsife, smelling saffron essence. Saffron was often used to create perfumes in premodern India. Photo by Steve Cohn.

Drawing on a wide range of Sanskrit texts, as wells as works by scholars of religion, history, material culture, anthropology and art history, McHugh offers a comparative study of the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain religious traditions with respect to smell. He illustrates his discourse on the uses and meanings of smells and perfumes in South Asia with extracts from Sanskrit texts, including a literary tale of a perfume-addicted, love-sick prince.

“Indian literary texts are filled with elaborate references to aromatics, perfumes, flowers, and even stinks, much more so than in a typical contemporary English language novel,” he said. “There is a rich smellscape of spring mango blossom, cool lotus breezes, fragrant damp earth, milk, honey and smoking sacrifices.

“The odors of cows and goats are other prominent olfactory benchmarks in technical texts,” McHugh added, “as are the stinks of fish, raw meat and foul corpses.”

Although they certainly never used such smells in perfumes, medieval Indians were comfortable with the pungency of their natural environment. They also preferred high levels of aromatics, in sharp contrast with today’s Western society which, as McHugh observed, is often far more concerned with masking or removing odor than creating it.

As a result, he noted, our modern aseptic world “smells rather dull for the most part: produce is sold chilled and wrapped; feces and urine are whisked away into sealed sewers; people generally deodorize their bodies and wear little if any fragrance; and our quest for longer blooming cycles means that on Valentine’s Day, most store-bought roses have no scent.”

Ironically, our modern obsession with odor removal creates its own catalog of “invisible” scents including deodorant, toothpaste and laundry detergent, which we all routinely wear. “However, they’re such ubiquitous odors that we have psychologically classified them as clean or neutral, and think they aren’t there,” McHugh said

A fresco of an Apsara, or celestial nymph, painted on the wall of the rock fortress Sigiriya, in Sri Lanka, adorns the cover of McHugh’s book. Image copyright Abbas/Magnum Photos. Cover design Oxford University Press.

The way the sense of smell is approached in Western literary works is also very different from how it is portrayed in premodern Indian texts. For the past 200 years, smell in Western society has been intricately linked with the evocation of memory, providing a pathway back to a former self, removed in time — although not necessarily in space — from the present.

This concept is virtually unheard of in medieval Indian texts, where smell served to unite the self with an odorous other (for example, a person, god or flower), who is removed in space but not in time. Thus premodern Indians did not share the modern Western notion of smell as a sense which links us to the past.

However, they did believe that foul odors could be employed to repel undesirable people or evil spirits, as in the practice of burning vulture dung during exorcisms to expel demons.

In medieval India, not only did odors have the power to attract or repulse, they were also considered to be indicators of virtue, McHugh said. Indeed, perfumes and aromatics, along with the sense of smell itself and other odors — both good and bad — were used as tools to create order in the universe and material and ethical hierarchies. Thus, for medieval Indians the good and the godly literally smelled divine, while evil stank.

However, smelling good was not always a good thing. In certain texts, McHugh discovered, a person with a persistent natural odor of fresh flowers was described as “bloomed,” a sinister metaphor suggesting imminent death.

McHugh’s interest in South Asian culture was sparked while growing up in northern England, a part of the United Kingdom with a large Indian immigrant community.

“I remember going to big Indian stores in Bradford as a boy and seeing all these materials and exotic spices and posters of Hindu gods and being fascinated and intrigued,” he said.

McHugh, who says he was torn between studying medicine or humanities and describes himself as “a bit of a medic/botanist manqué,” studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge, before pursuing a master’s degree in Indian Religions at the University of Oxford and then earning a Ph.D. from Harvard University for his research into the history of smell and perfume in premodern India. In 2008 he joined USC Dornsife where he teaches an introduction to Indian religions and a popular general education course titled, “Sense and Sensuality in Indian Religious Literature.”

In contrast to invisible modern perfumes, aromatic pastes, made from exotic materials like this fragrant sandalwood paste, were highly valued for their color and decorative value. Photo courtesy of James McHugh.

His original love of pharmaceuticals and plants led him to concentrate on those aspects in Indian culture and literature. Realizing there was an unexplored gap in historical, cultural and philosophical knowledge about the subject, McHugh decided to focus on synthesizing the theory and practice of perfumes and smell in religion, medicine and daily life in premodern India.

“During the Medieval period, India was the hub of the aromatic world,” McHugh said. Not only did the country produce many key ingredients including sandalwood, saffron and cardamom, it was also at the crossroads of the trade in rare and exotic aromatics used to make costly perfumes, with cloves, nutmeg and camphor coming from Southeast Asia, frankincense and myrrh from the Persian Gulf and musk from the Silk Route to the north.

“The elite demand for these rare materials led to their high exchange value,” McHugh said. “Both the high economic value and the aura of their exotic origins contributed to the manner in which the significance of perfumes was constructed; a certain golden, fragrant paste might not only be understood as a powerful cause of pleasure and arousal, it was also a marker of cosmopolitan values, wealth and cultivation.”

In fact, in premodern India a knowledge of aromatics was essential in order to be ranked among the cultivated. This is similar to the way it is considered important in the upper echelons of modern Western society to be something of a wine connoisseur. “Educated people appear to have been far more interested in and articulate about smells than we are,” McHugh said. “Anyone who was anyone in premodern India had to have a fairly sophisticated knowledge about the art of perfumery and how to combine scents in a pleasing and correct manner that took into account the season and the occasion.”

A popular Hindu poster of the image of Venkateshvara, a form of the Hindu god Vishnu, that is worshiped in a temple in the South Indian town of Tirupati. It is adorned with garlands and sandalwood paste while the forehead and face have been coated with white camphor, with a line of dark musk drawn down the middle. Photo courtesy of James McHugh.

McHugh’s book cites what is considered the earliest major text on perfumery during this period, contained in Varahamihira’s The Great Compendium orBrhatsamhita. In it, ingredients for perfume formulae are described as placed in a grid from which numerous combinations can be derived, with the possibility of creating a vast number of different scents. Varahamihira also provided an algorithm to calculate how many perfumes can be made from a set number of ingredients — up to 43,680 in one case.

“I wonder to what extent these mathematical exercises in perfumery may have been a source of intellectual delight for the educated connoisseur of perfume,” McHugh reflected in his study, noting that later perfumery texts also included sophisticated word puzzles. Some perfume formulae took the form of clever riddles peppered with — often risqué —puns. “I suggest that pleasures of perfume were not entirely olfactory,” McHugh concludes, “but also included the clever delights of combinatorics and word games.”

“It seems more than likely that manipulating the clever features of these formulae also constituted a pastime for the highly educated.”

Apr 09

Talk on Korean Buddhism THURS., APRIL 25 (Prof. Hwansoo Kim, Duke University)

CJRC EVENT: Korea’s Jōdōshinshū: Lay Monk Villages in Colonial Korea (1910-1945) [Thursday, April 25]

Research Position Available

Research Assistant wanted to assist with bibliographic work related religion and the human senses.  Approximately 200 hours of work @ $15 per hour April-June.  Must know your way around the major electronic bibliographies (e.g. JSTOR, ATLA, etc.).  Students already funded by any USC or Dornsife research grants should not apply.

Apr 08

Esteemed Israeli author Meir Shalev will be speaking at USC this Thursday!

Please RSVP to Ruth Weisberg (reweisb@usc.edu) or Dovie Bindell (bindell@usc.edu)

Apr 05

Reminder: Martha NUSSBAUM this Thursday, April 11!

FREE Reception (with food!), co-hosted by the School of RELIGION, to start at 4:00 pm

TALK begins at 5:00 pm

FACULTY and TAK initiates: We will hold our dinner and TAK initiation at the University Club directly following the talk.

If you’d like to check out Prof. Nussbaum’s new book in advance of the talk, you can find the details here: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674065901

Levan Institute Annual Distinguished Lecture: Martha Nussbaum

“The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear”

SOUL-SCREEN FILM FESTIVAL, Friday, April 12

http://cinema.usc.edu/events/event.cfm?id=13420
Friday, April 12th
Ray Stark Family Theatre
USC School of Cinematic Arts, 108
2:00pm - 10:00pm

FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. RSVP HERE


SOUL-SCREEN is USC’s first spiritual/religious film festival, and also an ongoing portal into interfaith engagement through media.

SOUL-SCREEN brings together filmmakers, academics, students, and the wider community to deepen interfaith relationships and expand spiritual consciousness. It showcases new films that explore conflict as well as communion between people of differing spiritual traditions. SOUL-SCREEN explores this question: what is the unique role of film and video in deepening inter-religious understanding and promoting inter-spiritual harmony? Respondents, including filmmakers, activists, and faith leaders, will stimulate conversation with audiences on topics such as:

*  Pluralism, particularity, and religious identity
*  Iconography, iconoclasm, and illusion: the promise and perils of visual representation of religion
*  Trends in religious/spiritual practice in America: how do they play on the screen?
*  How can film induce spiritual experience and express religious devotion?
*  How can film create religion, as well as educate about it?

Schedule of Films

2:00 P.M. - 5:00 P.M. First Session: BIG QUESTIONS
Focusing on the ultimate questions of meaning, life and death, and human connection.

Screenings of: Elephant Sighs (85m), My Last Days (2 Episodes, 20m), and Awe (16m)
Panel Discussion to follow featuring Dave Wells, Jake Bloch, and Justin Baldoni, moderated by Dr. Varun Soni, USC Dean of Religious Life.

6:00 - 10:00 P.M. Second Session: HOLY MEN
Focusing on creative and non-traditional spiritual leadership.

Screenings of: Crazy Wisdom (89m) and Kumaré (84m)
Panel Discussion to follow featuring Lisa Leeman and Vikram Gandhi, moderated by Dr. Varun Soni, USC Dean of Religious Life.