Jana Riess discovered she’d been changed by her attempts to practice the classic spiritual disciplines such as fasting, service, and prayer when she received a phone call informing her that her father was dying. He’d abandoned the family while she was growing up. She hadn’t seen him in 26 years.

“Here’s what I learned from my father’s sudden reappearance and death: all of those unsuccessful practices, those attempts at sainthood that felt like dismal failures at the time, actually took hold somehow,” Riess writes in her new memoir, Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor (Paraclete). “They helped form me into the kind of person who could go to the ...