In late spring 2019, ISI will publish the follow-up to Dr. Paul Kengor’s acclaimed bestseller A Pope and a President.  For The Divine Plan, Kengor teams up with writer-director Robert Orlando to dive deeper into the pivotal bond between Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan. Just six weeks apart in the spring of 1981, the pope and the president took bullets from would-be assassins. Surviving strikingly similar near-death experiences, they confided to each other a shared conviction: that God had spared their lives for the purpose of defeating communism. The Divine Plan draws on the film's exclusive interviews with renowned historians, scholars, journalists, and church officials.

When ISI published Paul Kengor’s A Pope and a President in May 2017, the book became an immediate critical and commercial success. ISI had to go back to reprint just two days after publication, and the book now has more than 40,000 copies in print!  Kengor has given hundreds of interviews and dozens of speeches about the book—at the Reagan Library, the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen Center, the U.S. Naval Academy, and many other places. Now he has teamed up with writer director Robert Orlando (Moment in Time, Apostle Paul, Silence Patton),  an author himself, to dive deeper into the singular bond between John Paul II and Ronald Reagan—the partnership that ended the Cold War. Shorter and more focused than A Pope and a President, The Divine Plan also boasts an even greater range of authorities.

Orlando interviews more than a dozen experts, including well-known historians Douglas Brinkley, H.W. Brands, Anne Applebaum, John O’Sullivan, and Craig Shirley; the leading biographer of John Paul II, George Weigel; close Reagan adviser Richard V. Allen; and Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Bishop Robert Barron.  The Divine Plan will be released in conjunction with the docudrama of the same name.