This wry memoir tackles twelve different spiritual practices in a quest to become more saintly, including fasting, fixed-hour prayer, the Jesus Prayer, gratitude, Sabbath-keeping, and generosity. Although Riess begins with great plans for success (“Really, how hard could that be?” she asks blithely at the start of her saint-making year), she finds to her growing humiliation that she is failing―not just at some of the practices, but at every single one. What emerges is a funny yet vulnerable story of the quest for spiritual perfection and the reality of spiritual failure, which turns out to be a valuable practice in and of itself.
Praise for Flunking Sainthood:
" Flunking Sainthood is surprising and freeing; it is fun and funny; and it is full of wisdom. It is, in fact, the best book on the practices of the spiritual life that I have read in a long, long time." - Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath
Jana Riess reminds us that saints are different from most of us: They are special, we are barely normal. They get it right, we rarely get it. They see God, we strain to see much of anything. And, Jana is no saint.
Rather than climbing to the pinnacle and sitting on a pedestal to tell us how it could be, Jana slides right next to us and reminds us that sainthood is overrated. With humor and insight she whispers to is that our lives matter just as they are. She prods us to never let our failures hold us back. She calls us to something greater than spiritual success - ordinary faithfulness.
Flunking Sainthood is the book I’m giving to my friends who are seeking to make sense of their emerging faith. - Doug Pagitt, author of A Christianity Worth Believing
“Jana Riess may have flunked at sainthood, but she's written a wonderful book. It's both reverent and irreverent, and it will make you want to become a better Christian -- or Jew, or Muslim, or Zoroastrian, or Jedi, or whatever you happen to be.” - AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically
"Warm, light-hearted, and laugh-out-loud funny, Jana Riess may indeed have flunked sainthood, but this memoir assures us that she is utterly and deeply human, and that is something even more wonderful. Honest and sincere, she will endear you from page one." -- Donna Freitas, author of The Possibilities of Sainthood
“With a helpfully hilarious account of her own grappling with godliness, Jana Riess proves to be a standup historian well-practiced in the art of oddly revivifying self-deprecation. She loves her guides, historical and contemporary, even as she finds them alternately impractical, harsh, or "infuriatingly jolly." The book is freaking wonderful―a candid and committed tale of prayers that resists supersizing and spirituality that has no home save the glory and the muck of the everyday.”--David Dark, author of The Sacredness of Questioning Everything
“Jana Riess's new book is a delight―fun, funny, engaging and a powerful reminder that the greatest work in our lives is not what we'll do for God but what God is doing in us.” --Margaret Feinberg, www.margaretfeinberg.com, author of Scouting the Divine and Hungry for God
“Flunking Sainthood allows those of us who have attempted new spiritual practices-- and failed-- to breathe a great sigh of relief and to laugh out loud. Jana Reiss’s exposé of her year-long and less-than-successful attempts at eleven classic spiritual practices entertains and educates us with its honesty and down-to-earthiness. In spite of Jana’s paltry attempts at piety and her botched prayer makeovers, God showed up in the surprising, sneaky ways that only God does.
Jana is the kind of girlfriend I like to have--hilarious, smart, stubborn, irreverent, and totally gaga over God. She writes in the unfiltered, uncensored way I’d write if I had the skill and the guts (Oh sorry, Mom, I meant gumption, not guts.)” --Sybil MacBeth, author of Praying in Color
Since 2008, Jana Riess has been an editor in the publishing industry, primarily working in the areas of religion, history, popular culture, ethics, and biblical studies. From 1999 to 2008, she was the Religion Book Review Editor for Publishers Weekly, and continues to write freelance reviews for PW as well as other publications.
She holds degrees in religion from Wellesley College and Princeton Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in American religious history from Columbia University. She speaks often to media about issues pertaining to religion in America, and has been interviewed by the Associated Press, Time, Newsweek, People, the Boston Globe, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and Newsday, among other print publications, as well as “Voice of America,” the “Today” show, MSNBC, and NPR’s “All Things Considered,” “Tell Me More,” and “Talk of the Nation.”
She is the author or co-author of many books, including The Prayer Wheel; Flunking Sainthood; What Would Buffy Do?; Mormonism for Dummies; and The Writer’s Market Guide to Getting Published, andThe Next Mormons: The Rising Generation of Latter-day Saints. Her book The Twible: All the Chapters of the Bible in 140 Characters or Less . . . . Now with 68% More Humor! won first place in the non-fiction category in the Writer’s Digest Annual Self-Published Book Awards.
She is a senior columnist for Religion News Service.
