Quote of Truman Madsen story:
Rewind four years, to spring 1954. At the end of a long day working at the National Shawmut Bank in Boston, Ann Madsen cleaned up her desk, hurried down the steps to the subway at South Station, and took the Red Line back to Cambridge. She got out at the Harvard Square stop and started the ten-minute walk to 21 Craigie Street, planning what she was going to cook her husband for dinner. She was pregnant with their first child, and he was in his first year of a PhD program at Harvard. She knew that he faced an examination on Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard the next day. After climbing the stairs to their attic apartment, she found her husband, Truman, studying—not Kierkegaard, but the Doctrine and Covenants.
Ann confronted Truman and asked why she should be working to support his graduate studies if he was only going to study the scriptures. Truman sat her down and quietly explained he had determined that the more he studied philosophy, the more he needed to study the revelations of the Prophet Joseph Smith.
“Give religion equal time,” his father Axel A. Madsen had counseled before Truman left to go to Harvard. Years later, Truman repeated Axel’s counsel when, as a tenured professor, he told an aspiring graduate student, “Don’t study philosophy on an empty stomach.”Truman had, by that time, long practiced what he preached. Indeed, it became the very story of his life: by study and faith (see D&C 88:118). He embodied the words of one of his mentors, Elder Hugh B. Brown: “Men live best when they neither deny themselves the verdict of the head nor the intimations of the heart, but seek a working harmony of both.”
Rewind four years, to spring 1954. At the end of a long day working at the National Shawmut Bank in Boston, Ann Madsen cleaned up her desk, hurried down the steps to the subway at South Station, and took the Red Line back to Cambridge. She got out at the Harvard Square stop and started the ten-minute walk to 21 Craigie Street, planning what she was going to cook her husband for dinner. She was pregnant with their first child, and he was in his first year of a PhD program at Harvard. She knew that he faced an examination on Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard the next day. After climbing the stairs to their attic apartment, she found her husband, Truman, studying—not Kierkegaard, but the Doctrine and Covenants.
Ann confronted Truman and asked why she should be working to support his graduate studies if he was only going to study the scriptures. Truman sat her down and quietly explained he had determined that the more he studied philosophy, the more he needed to study the revelations of the Prophet Joseph Smith.
“Give religion equal time,” his father Axel A. Madsen had counseled before Truman left to go to Harvard. Years later, Truman repeated Axel’s counsel when, as a tenured professor, he told an aspiring graduate student, “Don’t study philosophy on an empty stomach.”Truman had, by that time, long practiced what he preached. Indeed, it became the very story of his life: by study and faith (see D&C 88:118). He embodied the words of one of his mentors, Elder Hugh B. Brown: “Men live best when they neither deny themselves the verdict of the head nor the intimations of the heart, but seek a working harmony of both.”
