Wonder as a morally formative experience

Deep wonder is a response to the mystery of existence. It includes the experience of a ‘meaning gap’, a breakdown of meaning: your frameworks of understanding fall short. But deep wonder also contains the suggestion of new meaning – the hint of a promise that the meaning gap can be closed. Its moral-developmental potential is therefore ambiguous: it may reveal the world as mysterious but precious, and thus become a morally ‘in-formative’ experience – or it may shatter our sense of meaningfulness of the world, becoming morally ‘ex-formative’. Moral education should therefore attend to the meaning gap that surfaces in wonder.