John Widtsoe

In Saints — No Unhallowed Hand, Widtsoe appears as a young scholar driven by an almost limitless appetite for knowledge: he is singled out at his Brigham Young College (Logan) commencement for excellence in rhetoric, German, chemistry, algebra, and geometry, and is described as thrilled whenever he uncovered some new piece of knowledge — dreaming at night of acquiring all the world’s knowledge without having to master each subject one at a time. Theology became one of his favorite subjects, shaping his character and his sense of right and wrong.

Kyle reads Widtsoe’s later “Harvard doubt” arc as a faith-and-doubt narrative, pairing it in his connections with his own essay The Self-Own of Doubt alongside Lorena Larsen’s “dark night” — the human, lived version of the argument that intellectual doubt need not displace faith. Within the volume he sits among the figures (with Karl G. Maeser on education) carrying the Note-taking / Writing and learning threads through the late-19th-century Church.

Context: John A. Widtsoe (1872–1952) was a Norwegian-born scientist and educator who earned a doctorate in chemistry, served as president of both Utah State Agricultural College and the University of Utah, and was ordained an apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1921.

Where this appears

• Saints — No Unhallowed Hand — young Widtsoe’s hunger for knowledge and his later Harvard-doubt arc as a faith-and-doubt narrative