The Importance of Grounding Questions of Existence

In every culture, at every moment in history, people have tried to grapple with some grounding questions of existence. And I think if one is interested in those fundamental questions, there comes a kind of respect for the ways in which human cultures have approached them. That's something that whenever I teach religious texts, when I teachreligious texts from very different traditions in the Columbia core curriculum. We try to see what are the grounding questions, what are the fundamental questions,. What are the aspects of universal human experience that this religious approach is trying to grapple with, is trying to get a handle on?