All Masters School tenth graders along with new eleventh and twelfth graders are required to study world religions. A culminating experience of the year-long course is the annual trek to Queens, New York, home to perhaps thousands of houses of worship of every denomination.

On April 28, more than a hundred students and their teachers traveled to Queens to visit a Russian Orthodox Church in Flushing, New York. Subsequently, the students were divided into four separate groups to visit additional religious institutions including four Buddhist temples, two mosques, two Hindu temples, a Sikh Gurdwara, a Quaker meeting house, and a synagogue.

One student observed,"“Every place had a sense of reverence and holiness to it…but each was decorated differently.” Another commented, “One similarity in all the places we visited was that they all had an open mind and welcomed us in. They were willing to answer all of our questions, and I felt very warm to be greeted like that.”  

 “Students got a feel for religion as a living experience," explains world religions teacher Jane Rechtman. "It’s one thing to study a religion in class, it’s another to see it alive, in action. Because there were students from each class on the four separate itineraries, students then made presentations--with stunning pictures--to their classmates about the places they had visited."

One of the students wrote a thank-you note, which did, indeed, put the trip into perspective: “It is one thing to learn about Russian Orthodoxy, Buddhism, Hinduism, the Quaker religion, and others in the classroom but another to actually be immersed in the philosophy.”