A deeply informed look at the intensifying struggle over the future of the Catholic Church.Robert Blair Kaiser examines the most important and divisive issues confronting the Church: the sex abuse scandal, a shortage of priests due to the insistence upon celibacy, the ban on contraception, the roles of women in the Church, the increased participation of laypeople in Church affairs. He gives us an in-depth and behind-the-scenes view of six of the cardinals who gathered in Rome in Ap...

The definitive text on the mystery of R.F.K.'s assassination by a reporter who "got inside this story . . . with his impressive grasp of all the loose ends" ( Kirkus Reviews).On the night of June 4, 1968, Sirhan Sirhan shot and killed Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in a steamy pantry of the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel. Kennedy and his entourage had been celebrating his victory in the California primary for the Democratic nomination for president.Everybody ...

Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope, has captured our attention by stepping away from the papal throne, unafraid to give impromptu interviews, decentralize church governance, or explore new horizons for the greater good of the people of God. His actions and words suggest that he is here not to dominate but to serve, less inclined to preach than to listen, and to bring us back to Jesus “that we may have life and have it more abundantly.” Award-winning journalist Robert Blair Kaiser argues t...

Reporter Don Bolles rode into town and took dead aim at the Mafia. But the Phoenix establishment, giddy in its new prosperity, didn't want to listen to him, and, in the end, applauded and rewarded the men who covered up for his killers. A dark tale out of sun-drenched Arizona.

Headstrong Jessica Burns inherits the sorry, ever-losing New York Jets and vows (against the advice of her father, a winning high school coach in Colorado) to bring more fun and less violence to the NFL. She does this despite the opposition of the other owners, and the disbelief of most of the media, by finding a washed up coach in a wheel chair in the Arizona desert, falling in love with him, and hiring him to bring his revolutionary new razzle dazzle offense to New York. Win Markey was a...

Three liberation theologians kidnap Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, take him off in his own helicopter and put him on trial for his crimes before an international television audience. Convicted and sentenced to become a Christian, he undergoes a conversion and works to make a clerical Church into the kind of community that will give everyone a voice, a vote, and citizenship in their Church.

How the people of God, not the pope, changed the Catholic Church's teaching on birth control. A history of the papal birth control commission of the 1960s and its aftermath narrated by a man who was there, Time magazine's correspondent at Vatican II.