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By Anonymous
This blog is written by the students of Dr. Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus’  course Religion 365: Smells and Bells: The Sensual Dimensions of Religion (Fall 2026, Spring 2025, Spring 2022, Spring 2020, Spring 2018, Spring 2015), at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. If you have questions, you can contact me by email at jkraus@wheatonma.edu.

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Memorable Moments: time and place

By Josephine Mortrud
Taste presentation  Memorable Moments: time and place Dear REL-365-B01-2025, I had the privilege of taking SMells and Bells in the second semester of my senior year. JBK and I planned for me to take this course one year prior while planning out my religion minor. It was a really long year but I am so glad I got to take this course when I did. Class meetings for this course were some of the more challenging and more calming for me throughout the semester. Some days I anxiously sat out of conversations while scrolling through apartment websites and wondering if I needed to look for another job. Other days we made s’mores, celebrated the trees’ New Year, and went on a walk in the Wheaton Woods.  New Years for the trees Pilgrimage to the Bra Tree As always I deeply appreciated hearing from my peers especially when we disagree. I am honored to be seen as a safe person to disagree with. I am thankful for anyone who shared especially in particularly small and vulnerable classes like ...
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Naming Scents: The Ambiguous Nature of Describing Smell

By Samantha K
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It is really difficult to name smells without just saying the thing that produces a smell. We don’t really have words for smells specifically. A floral scent is called that because it smells like flowers, “floral” is not its own word specifically for the scent. This becomes especially apparent when reading the names of candles and perfumes. For example, I own a perfume named “Velvet Moon”. That name has nothing to do with what it smells like, and yet I personally think it is aptly named. The perfume smells like cardamom, mahogany, beeswax, and black pepper. Is that what the moon or velvet smells like? Almost certainly not. But the words used to describe the scent have given me the association between those scents, velvet, and the moon. This is also true when the name of a scent doesn’t match what mid tells you something should smell like. There is a Yankee candle called “By the Pool” that is amber and coconut scented. That notably is not what pools smell like, so while the scent itself...
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Justice

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We know the five major senses- touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing- and we know that there are many senses beyond those ones we tend to limit ourselves to- like your sense of pain or temperature. But how many other senses are there?  Which one is our sixth sense? In The Deepest Sense , I was most fascinated by the chapter on animals. Because they had a good example for what I believe is the sixth sense that ties society together. That is, one's sense of justice. Justice is something that you perceive, and it is something that is perceived by the rest of nature, or at least our closer relatives in the animal kingdom. In that experiment, one of the monkeys was upset by the injustice of the other monkey getting better treatment. This is the cornerstone of every great society- the distributing proper treatment of people and the earth. When there is great inequality, people rise up, because they sense that justice has failed them. Sure, sensing ghosts is probably the most wel...
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