About the author

Philip Shenon is an award-winning investigative journalist and bestselling author was a reporter at The New York Times for more than twenty years. He is the author of two New York Times-bestselling books: A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (2013) and The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (2008). His latest book is an investigative history of the modern Roman Catholic Church: Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church (Alfred A. Knopf, February 2025). Kirkus Reviews hailed the book as "an extraordinary accomplishment" and “a quite frankly epic examination of the Roman Catholic Church." Booklist magazine described Jesus Wept as “endlessly fascinating, insightful and brilliantly told,” as well as “highly readable.” Publishers Weekly praised the book for its “prodigious research,” resulting in a “richly detailed portrait of a complex, hierarchical, and secretive institution as it grappled with a modernizing world.” Most of Shenon’s career at The Times was spent either in the paper’s Washington D.C. bureau or abroad. As a Washington correspondent, he covered the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the F.B.I., the State Department and Congress. As a foreign correspondent, he reported from more than sixty countries and several warzones. A native of San Francisco, he now lives in Washington D.C.