Jesus Wept. So Did Tony Stark. Why the Jesuits Love a Good Redemption Arc

We love watching people change. Maybe because deep down, we’re all hoping we can too.

Whether it’s Darth Vader removing his mask, Zuko switching sides in Avatar: The Last Airbender, or even Saul Goodman realizing he can’t outrun the wreckage of his own choices—redemption arcs hit us where we live. They remind us that people are complicated, capable of surprising growth, and rarely just one thing.

Which is why Jesuits would probably feel right at home in a writers’ room.

Ignatian spirituality is obsessed with transformation—but not the tidy, three-act kind. Instead, the Jesuit tradition understands the human story as messy, recursive, and marked by the slow, often painful work of discernment. You don’t “level up” and become a saint. You learn to notice, over time, where the spirit is moving—and where ego, fear, and false desire are leading you astray.

St. Ignatius himself was a vain, wounded soldier obsessed with honor, who only began to change after being laid out by a cannonball and stuck reading the lives of the saints. His transformation wasn’t a single moment of conversion—it was a long, uneven journey marked by both grace and grit. Sound familiar? It's giving "season three arc with emotional flashbacks."

“God deals directly with the individual soul,” St. Ignatius said, reminding us that transformation is personal. No one has a generic arc—we each wrestle with grace, failure, and growth in our own way.

This view of human nature resists flat categories like "good guy" or "bad guy." Jesuits don’t ask “is this person good?” but “how is this person growing?” Which makes a lot of pop culture surprisingly Jesuit in spirit.

Let’s take a few examples:

• Darth Vader (Star Wars): A fallen Jedi turned ruthless enforcer. But at the end, moved by love and sacrifice, he acts selflessly to save his son. Jesuits would call this a movement toward consolation—a moment of clarity when one recognizes what truly matters and acts accordingly.
• Severus Snape (Harry Potter): Cold, cruel, and bitter—but also brave, loyal, and profoundly wounded. In Jesuit terms, Snape is a walking case study in interior complexity. His story is about vocation in spite of brokenness, love in spite of resentment, and the fact that motives are rarely pure.
• Zuko (Avatar): Few arcs capture Ignatian ideas of discernment better. Zuko spends entire seasons torn between loyalty to his father and a dawning sense of justice. His turning point doesn’t come easy—it’s born of reflection, spiritual struggle, and the courage to act differently. It’s basically the Spiritual Exercises in cartoon form.
• Saul Goodman (Better Call Saul): A man who runs from himself—until he doesn't. Jesuit thinking would call this a confrontation with truth, a final reckoning with one’s choices not to punish, but to reclaim a sliver of moral agency.

All of these arcs suggest something Jesuits have been saying for centuries: we are in process. Our identity is not fixed. Our past doesn’t trap us. But neither are we innocent just because we feel misunderstood. What matters is how we respond to grace, how we pay attention to the inner movements that pull us toward or away from love.

So are people truly good or evil? The Jesuit answer might be: We are what we choose, moment by moment—and we are more than any one moment.

Redemption is real, but it’s never simple. It’s not about erasing what came before. It’s about choosing, even late in the story, to walk toward the light.