Wonder as a New Starting Point for Theological Anthropology

Book excerpt: In Wonder as a New Starting Point for Theological Anthropology: Opened by the World, José Francisco Morales Torres constructs a new theological anthropology that begins with wonder. He contends that the visceral experience of wonder is an opening up of the human by an excess that saturates the world. This opened-by-ness points to a transforming receptivity as the basis of the person and to an extravagant Generosity that grounds all creation. Thus, wonder, which is grounded in generous Excess, is not only a gift but a demand: it calls for a liberative praxis that resist the forces that flatten the fullness of life into what is ‘useful’ and profitable and that reduce the limitless worth of fellow humans to mere commodities to be exploited and exchanged at the altar of the idolatrous ‘Market’. Wonder reveals a primordial receptivity in the human person, which demands of us an ethic of sustainability that does not reduce the other to commodity, a vulnerability that risks being opened by the other, a commitment to solidarity and liberation that resist the forces of an insatiable, idolatrous Market that seeks “only to steal and kill and destroy.”