Fuller leads us on a fascinating exploration of the connections between personality, emotions, and spiritual belief. This is a must read for anyone who is curious about the human instinct to believe in the unknown.—Dean Hamer, author of The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes

This exciting, groundbreaking inquiry illustrates how the study of religion is enriched through a focus on emotion. Fuller's analysis of wonder, which draws impressively on recent advances in emotions research in the social and behavioral sciences, philosophy, and cultural history, invites us to think about religion in a new way.—John Corrigan, Florida State University

The thesis of Wonder is a tight and telling one, namely, that the emotion of wonder is central to the human experiences of meaning, beauty, and spirituality, and that no anthropology, epistemology, or psychology can be complete without it. What impresses me most about this idea is how it throws new light on a number of intellectual topics, from the psychology of the modern 'spiritual seeker,' to the science/religion debates, to the very nature of religious studies as an academic discipline. What is it that scholars of religion are in fact really studying? And how is this different from the objects of the natural sciences? Very much in line with earlier thinkers such as Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Otto, Fuller makes a potent case that it is meaning, beauty, shock, paradox, and awe that define wonder, and that it is here that we best look for some of the deepest meanings of religious experience.—Jeffrey J. Kripal, Rice University