What is Ask Big Questions?

Askbigquestions is a national initiative that lives on college campuses. It consists of a print media campaign, this website, and live events including reflection sessions, text-study-based discussions, forums for creating art and expressing creativity, and other programs.

Askbigquestions is founded on the assumption that all human beings are ultimately concerned with some common questions of ultimate concern, including: Who am I? What is my heritage? What do I want my story to be? Who will my partners be? Who will be in my community? What will be my vocation in the world? Where will I make a home? What will be my legacy? These questions provide a common starting point for students of all backgrounds to interact with one another, and they 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 integrated, or global, 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. And 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 commons.