I
have a very important announcement to make: as of today, Mark Ashurst-McGee's thesis, A Pathway to Prophethood: Joseph Smith Junior as Rodsman,
Village Seer, and Judeo-Christian Prophet (2000), is now available online
for free download.
Last
week, I pointed out to the Utah State Univeristy's Digital Commons that the
above master's thesis was missing from their "ALL GRADUATE THESES AND
DISSERTATIONS" site. To my surprise, I received an email that they would
soon make the thesis available, and today, they informed me that they have done
so.
Back
in May, a good friend of mine provided me with a PDF copy of Mark's thesis, but
it was an image only scanned document which does not allow text to be copied.
The new USU PDF document is OCR (Optical Character Recognition) based, which
allows text copying (and pasting), and makes citations so much easier.
Mark
Ashurst-McGee's master thesis is one of the most important contributions on the
history of Joseph Smith Jr. as it relates to his involvement in certain aspects
of 'folk magic' and 'occult' practices. Mark sees Joseph's participation in
such practices as a preparation for his eventual calling as God's chosen
prophet for the restoration Christ's Church which had fallen into apostasy, becoming a church in name only, having no divine authority. The following is from
the abstract of the thesis:
Joseph
Smith Junior, founder of the Mormon faith, presented himself to America and the
world as a prophet with the same powers as the widely known prophetic figures
of the Bible. Like Moses and Elijah, he made God's will known to humankind.
Before assuming this role, Smith had used divining rods and then seer stones to
find underground water, buried treasure, lost items, and stray livestock. This
thesis charts Joseph Smith's progression from rodsman to seer to prophet. (Page
iii)
This
thesis is a must read for those who have even just a minor interest in
Mormonism.
ENJOY
!!!
Grace
and peace,
David
