ABSTRACT
This essay discusses Pope Francis’s emphasis on ‘awe and wonder’ in religious contexts. Wonder is transient. It is, nevertheless, the ‘beginning of the habitual state of Christians’. The essay also considers his thoughts on wonder in relation to literature, art and morality. Wonder should be nourished and nurtured, he suggests, for the benefits that it brings to our moral well-being and to our engagement with the natural world. What is the inspiration for these ideas? Is the answer, perhaps, Pope Francis’s familiarity with the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola?
