Wonder, the mental state of openness, questioning, curiosity, and embracing mystery, arises out of experiences of awe.

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Those two books archive the big idea of U.S. history: the subjugation of people of color by a succession of social systems, from the genocide of Indigenous people to slavery to mass incarceration.

A third wonder of life should not surprise. It is nature.

Awe is the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand.

It is tempting to think that greater wealth enables us to find more awe, in the fancy home, for example, or exclusive resort, or high-end consumer goods. In fact, the opposite appears to be true, that wealth undermines everyday awe and our capacity to see the moral beauty in others, the wonders of nature, or the sublime in music or art. Our

These three stories of awe—the scientific, the cultural, and the personal—converge on an understanding of how we can find awe.

We can find awe, then, in eight wonders of life: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and epiphany.

What is an experience of awe that you have had, when you encountered a vast mystery that transcends your understanding of the world?

the heart of religion: that it is about mystical awe, an ineffable emotional experience of being in relation to what we consider divine.