The Difference Between Heroes and Saints

It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference between them matters:

Stories . . . told with . . . heroes at the center of them . . . are told to laud the virtues of the heroes—for if the hero failed, all would be lost.

By contrast, a saint can fail in a way that the hero can’t, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a…