On Saturday, October 24, 2026, the Carmel Institute organized a trip to the Museum of the Bible. Professor Fedyashin gave the students a 90-minute tour of the museum’s archaeological holdings and religious writings—from fourth-century papyri to Byzantine psalters and the King James Bible.

Film screenings, museum visits, concert attendance, and study trips have been part of the Carmel Institute’s programming since its inception. As Professor Fedyashin has always reminded his students, although our knowledge about the past depends primarily on reading, history must also be walked, seen, touched, smelled, and tasted.

The tour combined the biographies of religious thinkers, the history of Western art, and the story of interfaith relations between East and West. The students also read an article by Russian-born Byzantinist Dmitry Obolensky, “Byzantium, Kiev and Moscow: A Study in Ecclesiastical Relations,” which appeared the Dumbarton Oaks Papers in 1957, selections from George Vernadsky’s The Mongols and Russia, a chapter from James Billington’s The Icon and the Axe, and a section of Richard Wortman’s Scenarios of Power, which placed the religious writings and images the group saw in the museum into the context of their time.

The trip was a visual and intellectual component of a holistic experience that stays with students of history for much longer. After the tour, the group went to lunch.