Review
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Title: Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand: Reflections on Faith, Reason, Charity, and Beauty
Author: Thomas F. Rogers
Publisher: Neal A. Maxwell Institute
Genre: Devotional writing
Year Published: 2016
Number of Pages: 349
Binding: Paper
ISBN13: 9780842529761
Price: $21.95
Reviewed by Douglas F. Christensen, PhD for the Association for Mormon Letters
Anyone who devotes an entire life to creative intellectual enterprise might hope to present the span of this life of thought in one cohesive package. Thomas F. Rogers has completed such a task with his *Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand: Reflections on Faith, Reason, Charity, and Beauty*. Rogers’ title has a double meaning because *Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand* works both as a plea for his readers to open their hearts and minds to learning and toward the encounter of the other person with all her potential flaws and difference, but it also works as a promise that if you read his book, you will be taxed, stretched, and rewarded with insight and inspiration–your heart and mind will expand.
On the one hand his collection does not stake out a thesis. Rogers is not presenting the reader with a deterministic argument. It is rather an amalgamation of thought experiments. It has the feel of an intellectual scrapbook with notes Rogers has taken after living through profound events, notes students have sent him after reflecting on their own circumstances in the context of their membership in the LDS church (but also in the context of his affable and passionate classroom teaching) along with sermons, essays, journal entries, letters and a variety of poems, play excerpts, and quotations. *Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand* is a compilation of greatest hits from an academic and artist whose life has been chock filled with an impassioned search for meaningfulness.
Nevertheless, taken as a whole, this seemingly disparate hodgepodge of ideas does present a thesis. Rogers provides a lifetime of critical thinking to address a contemporary culture of religious questioning and angst, not by pontificating, but by sharing his own questioning and religious angst. What emerges is a thesis of reassurance that through patience and candid investigation his readers can find answers to difficult questions or at least consolation in the face of holy mystery.
Like any testimonial, Rogers’ book works like a confession. He begins with the line: “I have never contemplated leaving the LDS church, although I have imaginatively identified with those who have.” This line assures his believing readers that he is committed for the long haul, but it also invites religious skeptics to accept a warm welcome of empathy. If the ethos of a text has to do with character and credibility, then Rogers’ prose offers equal reassurance to orthodox believers and faltering wanderers. He promotes these tensions by outlining his own reflexive faith journey that includes vistas of faith and valleys of vociferous suspicion, if not doubt.
Chapter one proceeds with seven reasons for his faith, but rather than promoting facile orthodoxy, his reasons are genuine and confessional: I practice Mormonism because I am “locked in by extensive ancestral ties”; because there is nothing better out there; because I have a testimony of the inspiration behind the church; because the “restored gospel’s explanation of life and human destiny satisfies a restless and contemplative mind,” and so on (6-8). Rogers never takes his justifications for faith for granted. He examines his own beliefs carefully, but he includes letters to doubting students as well as letters he has sent to friends inside church correlation, letters that address how the church could deal more openly and honestly with contradiction.
While Rogers shares nuances of his own questions, sometimes in response to and sometimes because of his personal reflections, he also shares lots of converting stories, like the way he went into his role as an MTC (Missionary Training Center) branch president with serious concerns about the operation of affairs at the MTC. His assumption was that the MTC was something like a stockyard processing missionaries through a system of platitudes and over simplification. He left with a profound respect and admiration for the changes available for missionaries who come in with open and willing hearts, to experience “the spirit of the MTC, a spirit that is essentially the spirit of loving one’s neighbor” (41).
Since much of Rogers’ writing takes place in the context of his role as Professor of Russian (or as head of the Honors Program) at BYU, there is a sensibility of activism in his writing. While his language always communicates a believing and contemplative mind, it comes along with sustained restlessness. In his chapter: “Riding the Edge of the Herd,” he laments the jingoism and materialism inside the church, criticizing the “‘super-American’ image we have so unreservedly assumed since the 1890’s, leading us to confuse spiritual with rank materialistic and philistine values, venerating and settling all too readily for the electronic media’s synthetic pop culture. . . There is evil in banality and in the shortsighted materialistic busyness, that we need to be told about and reprimanded for along with our other more blatant sins” (79-81).
He follows this seemingly strident impatience for American Mormon culture with affirming defense of the Book of Mormon and of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Never the neophyte, Rogers advocates for real Nephites and Lamanites. Fully aware of Joseph Smith’s incongruities (thanking Donna Hill for this awareness), still he finds in Joseph an inspired syncretist who can be viewed “with great confidence, but only when assisted by the spirit and by thoughtfully weighing all he has given us” (107-108).
Rogers’ writing reaches its peak in his section on charity. Here he recommends commonplaces like reconciliation and forgiveness, not letting superficial agitations divide us, and knowing and caring about others in order to learn and practice charity. He seasons his writing with quotations from academics, public intellectuals, philosophers, many students, and poetry from the likes of Auden, Yeats, and E.E. Cummings.
However, the prevailing thread right to the end of the book, the most meaningful potential effect on the reader comes through in the pathos of a teacher. Rogers may be a former mission president, he may be a playwright, he may be a storyteller or a painter; he may be a Russian at heart, he may be a Patriarch. But in the 300 plus pages of *Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand* he is most warmly and consistently a teacher. He shares equally from his mind and from his heart, from dispassionate critical distance and from intimate, confessional spiritual yearning. His teaching is open and generous as well as varied and provocative. Whether he is teaching the reader the finer implications in great Russian literature, or unpacking the literary and spiritual qualities of the gospel of John, Rogers patiently, caringly guides us through mediations that hold the promises of grace and hope.
While this book has a little something for everyone, it may not appeal to all readers. This is mainly a book for a Latter-day Saint reader. More specifically, the audience may be best defined by the mission of its publisher, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute: “to deepen understanding and nurture discipleship among Latter-day Saints and to promote mutual respect and goodwill among people of all faiths through the scholarly study of religious texts and traditions.” One of Thomas F. Rogers’ achievements here is in his appeal to that mission statement. His devotion to deepening understanding and discipleship come through in equal measure. However, the overall appeal is in its pluralistic perspective, and in its humanity.
Readers who stick with the book from cover to cover will receive more than they paid for in time, thought, and the price of the book, but it will also serve as a useful reference for personal study, writing ideas, sermons, and topical learning. This compilation casts a long complementary shadow for one of Mormonism’s rare hearts and minds.