I like to ask big questions, especially questions that have no clear answers. As a kid I loved all subjects in school, and in college I waited until the last possible day, at the end of my sophomore year, to decide between a history major and a chemistry major. I still love science—last year I taught a religion and science class with an astronomer! But I decided that for me, looking at history would allow me to think about the things that most excite me, especially the incredible variety of ways humans have created to be human. It wasn’t until graduate school in American Studies—a field that combines US history with other aspects of the humanities—that I came to see that studying religion in America opened for me the human experience most compellingly. Religions, after all, are the cultural systems that address both the most intimate and most expansive aspects of the human experience. No matter what topic I am teaching I try to bring students into this human drama, and I am especially excited to do that with first-years in our Engagements course on apocalypse, an idea that conjures perhaps the big questions of them all.