thomas f. rogers

Robert A. Rees is a visiting professor of religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He announces today’s release of Thomas F. Rogers’s Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand, a spiritually and intellectually stimulating collection of essays, articles, letters, poetry, and art exploring faith, reason, charity, and beauty. The latest in the Maxwell Institute’s Living Faith book series is now available at LDS book retailers and Amazon. In a world (and sometimes the church itself) in which the head and the heart are often divided, Thomas F. Rogers has sought his entire life to unify and harmonize his own and others’ hearts and minds through his teaching, writing, and devoted service to Christ. Tom has been a blessing and a gift to me. There is no better way to summarize his life. His marvelous new collection of essays, letters, and lectures—Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand: Reflections on Faith, Reason, Charity, and Beauty—is also a blessing and a gift.In 2001 when I edited Why I Stay: The Challenges of Discipleship for Contemporary Mormons I placed Tom’s essay “It Satisfies My Restless Mind” at the beginning. It seemed not only to capsulize what I hoped the volume would accomplish (give thoughtful expression to deep devotion), but to set the tone for the entire collection. I’m pleased to see it included in this collection along with other inspiring personal expressions of Tom’s thinking and believing I’d not encountered before, divided into four themes: faith, reason, charity, and beauty, each of them informing the others.The Maxwell Institute has also published a companion website to the book featuring the collected plays of Thomas F. Rogers.Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand reveals what a rare modern disciple Tom is—a man who is as rigorous in his pursuit of the life of the mind as he is in his devotion to the riches and wonders of the spirit, and a disciple who is as comfortable with his liberal politics as he is with his conservative community. Like Joseph Smith, Tom has sought truth by being willing to “prove contraries.”What has impressed me about Tom as much as anything over the years of our friendship is his erudition—the sophistication of his religious, scholarly, and creative mind. Tom reads widely and deeply, which is also how he thinks—and believes. In fact, this collection is an education in the humanities—a discipline so easily denigrated in contemporary culture despite being essential to our survival as a civilization by encouraging responsible critical and speculative inquiry. Just as the humanities are often coupled with the arts because they are so complementary, so are they in Tom’s life. As a creative artist (a playwright, poet, and painter) Tom shows in Expand that it is possible to celebrate the imagination as well as the mind—to create beauty and meaning as complements to faith and reason. It brims with intelligence, personal candor, honesty, and openness. Perhaps it is Tom’s role as a teacher (and, as with all good teachers, perpetual student) that comes through most in these essays.Out of so many excellent pieces in Expand, it is not possible to select only one. But the following quote is among my favorites, not only because it epitomizes Tom’s thinking but because he exemplifies it in his life—a life of balanced devotion to faith, reason, charity, and beauty: “The urge to take an extreme position in either direction for the sake of the certainty we would all naturally prefer may be the greatest failing of our race.” Humility—intellectual and spiritual—is a hallmark of Tom’s work and his life as a disciple of Christ.In his epigraph on the humanist Sir Thomas More, the poet J. V. Cunningham, wrote: Friend, on this scaffold Thomas More lies dead Who would not cut the Body from the Head. Fortunately, Tom Rogers—who also would not cut the body or heart from the head—is very much with us still. What’s more, his insights will live on in this valuable collection to the blessing of younger generations of readers. May he continue to thrive and bless us with his many gifts for years to come!

It’s been sixteen years since Thomas F. Rogers reviewed Donna Hill’s biography of Joseph Smith, reflecting on the tendency to treat LDS history with great caution. Rogers wrote before the days of Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling and the Joseph Smith Papers Project. What is most striking about Rogers’s analysis of Hill’s biography in light of contemporary LDS culture is the way he associates historically responsible scholarship with the strength of community. A lack of healthy historical self-disclosure, he writes, can “breed loneliness and make us, more than it should, strangers to each other.”According to Rogers, good history matters especially when it helps us feel less alone: To those who in their turn selectively handle Mormon history and discourage our probing it in a number of areas, one needs to say (or at least to ask): Haven’t we been, if anything, overly cautious, overly mistrustful, overly condescending to a membership and a public who are far more perceptive and discerning than we often give them credit for? Haven’t we, in our care not to offend a soul or cause anyone the least misunderstanding, too much deprived such individuals of needful occasions for personal growth and more in-depth life-probing experience? In our neurotic cautiousness, our fear of venturing, haven’t we often settled for an all-too-shallow and confining common denominator that insults the very Intelligence we presume to glorify and is also dishonest because, deep down, we all know better (to the extent that we do)? Isn’t our intervention often too arbitrary, reflecting the hasty, uninformed reaction of only one or a couple of influential objectors? Don’t we in the process too severely and needlessly test the loyalty and respect of and lose credibility with many more than we imagine? Isn’t there a tendency among us, bred by the fear of displeasing, to avoid healthy self-disclosure—public or private—and to pretend about ourselves to ourselves and others? Doesn’t this in turn breed loneliness and make us, more than it should, strangers to each other? And when we are too calculating, too self-conscious, too mistrustful, too prescriptive, and too regimental about our roots and about one another’s aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual life, aren’t we self-defeating? This excerpt is from Thomas F. Rogers’s forthcoming book Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand: Reflections on Faith: Reason, Charity, and Beauty. It is the latest volume in the Maxwell Institute’s Living Faith series.Early birds who can’t wait until the June 14th release can pick up a copy of Expand for half price this week at the Mormon History Association conference in Snowbird, Utah. It’s our gift to the Mormon history community. The Maxwell Institute extends its sincere and continued gratitude for the women and men who passionately pursue Mormon history—those from the past, those in the present, and those yet to come. Don’t be a stranger. Stop by our booth and say hello.