AskBigQuestions is a national initiative that cultivates civil society by providing an open space for college students to engage the BIG questions of life.  Through student led discussions, roundtable conversations with professors & community leaders, and a dynamic website, AskBigQuestions fosters discussions around topics that all human beings contemplate, ranging from politics to social change, from biology to God.

AskBigQuestions is founded on the idea that all human beings are ultimately concerned with the same common questions of ultimate concern, including: Who am I? What is my heritage? What do I want my story to be? Who will be in my community? Why are we here? Are we free? What will our legacy be? These questions provide a common starting point for students of diverse backgrounds to interact with one another; these are questions that all the world’s great religious and scholarly traditions address.

AskBigQuestions is one important model in the effort to recover and renew the civic engagement agenda. It reflects the urgency within higher education today of expanding educational vision to include a notion of global, or integrated, selfhood. In promoting global selfhood, we are part of a larger community within higher education that is rediscovering a language whose words and concepts include “questions of ultimate concern,” as well as mentorship, wholeness, and paradox. We are reclaiming practices like public discussion in a “great good place” and storytelling, and, in certain environments, meditation and prayer. In the process, AskBigQuestions aims to re-form the fragments of our society into a more whole and peaceful community.