Truman Grant Madsen was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, the second son of Axel A. and Emily Grant Madsen, and a grandson of LDS Church President Heber J. Grant. He was married to Ann Nicholls Madsen and they had three children and a Navajo foster son. Truman served as a missionary in the New England Mission. After his marriage and the start of his academic career, he was called in 1961 to serve as president of the New England Mission. He served in this position until he was replaced by Boyd K. Packer in 1965. He also served in the LDS Church as a district presidency counselor, Sunday School teacher, bishop, Sunday School general board member, stake president, and patriarch.
Truman obtained his undergraduate degree in speech and a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Utah. He also studied philosophy at USC, and earned a PhD from Harvard University in the history and philosophy of religion. Early in his studies at Harvard he determined to “give religion equal time,” and studied the revelations of the Prophet Joseph Smith as deeply as he studied philosophy.
He was a professor of philosophy at Brigham Young University for well over thirty years and Director of the Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies in Jerusalem for three years. He held the Richard L. Evans Chair in Judeo-Christian Studies for twenty years, was a guest professor at Northeastern University in Boston, University of Haifa in Israel, and Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and lectured at over 100 universities in the United States and over 50 universities around the world. He was a prolific author, a recognized authority on Joseph Smith, and a popular lecturer among Latter-day Saints. He was also one of the editors and a contributor to the five-volume Encyclopedia of Mormonism and sponsored several symposia on comparative religion. He wrote and spoke on a wide range of topics about the restored gospel. Much of his attraction was his ability to compare and contrast the gospel with the other faiths and philosophies.
”Much of his success was due to his personal appeal. Though as a boy he and his two brothers were vigorously grilled by his father in the arts of language and presentation, he was blessed with an ideal speaking voice and a “sparkling personality.” He had a nimble mind and a capacity to grasp profound issues and yet convey them to the comprehension on layperson levels.
Virtually all of his presentations were extemporaneous, and he was a master of this dying art, which is now yielding to the teleprompter and PowerPoint. It will probably never be known how many people he touched and moved in areas ranging from casual to profound, but the number is large. His demand as a speaker began early in his career and remained intense through his life. He traveled all over the world to inform and inspire audiences about the exhilarating experiences associated with the gospel of Christ that invite our embrace.”
After battling with cancer for a year, Truman Madsen passed away on May 28th, 2009.
(Sources: TrumanMadsen.com, BYU Religious Studies Center, MormonWiki.com)
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