The elements in the life and work of Simone Weil, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and certain movie characters that speak most effectively about the qualities of the secular saint are a concern for the suffering of others and the willingness to do all that one can to ameliorate the human condition. Most of these key individuals also recognized that people have both bodies and souls and that the needs of both must be satisfied in order to achieve wholeness. Simone Weil, for example, contended that every individual is obligated to do everything possible to meet the body- and soul-related needs of every other person (Ambrosio, 2009, p. 59). Martin Luther King takes both a Christian and a secular approach to arguing against racism as a form of "violence against humanity" (Ambrosio, 2009, p. 63). Mother Teresa devoted her life to caring for the poor and communicating to them that God loved them through other human beings (Ambrosio, 2009, p. 63). Movies such as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings illustrate the role of the hero in the American imagination, and war films such as Sands of Iwo Jima and Platoon demonstrate how secular saints are willing to give their lives for those of others.
Simone Weil's view of justice demonstrates a rooting in Greek philosophy by virtue of her impersonal worldview that is divided into the two separate realms of body and soul (Ambrosio, 2009, p. 59). Weil views human freedom, "the capacity every person always has to consent or withhold consent" to look beyond worldly things to "that transcendent good, which alone can wholly satisfy the fullest desire of the heart" (Ambrosio, 2009, p. 59). For Weil, this aspiration is not only equivalent to the concept of justice as making sure that "no avoidable harm is done to any person," but it is also what she professes as faith (Ambrosio, 2009, p. 59). She derives her concept from Plato and elaborates on it from her own pe
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