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The Conglue Light, a myth in circling glue, lead thou me on the night is dark and I am far from home.

Hello Mormon Stories listeners and welcome back to part two of my interview with Dr. Thomas Murphy in part one.

We have discussed his early years in the church, his some challenges he faced around abuse authority and lack of inspiration with leadership that led to he and his wife kind of separating from the church.

We learned about his interest in anthropology and his military service that led to his budding career in studying Native American anthropology amongst Mormons in Mexico and Guatemala and we've learned about some of the research papers that he wrote early on on some of these topics.

Now we're going to jump to the part that intersects with my personal life which is his work around publishing a paper on DNA in the Book of Mormon.

We've got a lot to cover, we've got about two hours to go, this will be segment two of three.

We want to just be really careful about getting the narrative in, getting whatever details important to get the story crossed but not taking, you know, leaving time for the rich content that comes after this part of the story.

So we'll balance that together but so talk about you know you publish your dissertation, you finish your dissertation, you graduate or whatever, take us to through your interest in DNA in the Book of Mormon, the publishing of the article and what happened after.

Well we got a little bit of that out of order there so I'll kind of split that. So my first version of the first draft of the dissertation, it was a pretty sketchy draft but I'd given it to my committee and they had redirected me away from looking at the Populvoo and Black Oakspeaks as additional forms of American scripture and really you know that original version would have been called something like blank paper.

It's not something like blank pages and scriptural tombs and looking at the making of scripture and instead they directed me more towards a deeper engagement with the the the Nahwa material that I had gathered in my research and the Ethnological material that I gathered about Mormons and Native Americans in the United States.

And so what after that first version there like make these changes I got I was on the job market already and I was expecting to finish and of course dissertation committees have this history of kind of making you stop and restart and that happened while I was on the job market and I got a full time job and I was offered a job at Edmunds Community College which was nearby.

It was really great for my family my daughter was able to stay in the same high school and and you know Kerry could continue her job and we didn't we didn't have to have that disruption to family so it was very convenient and I actually went on leave while I started my teaching and it was actually through teaching that I would start to get involved a little more with biological anthropology and eventually with DNA.

And so one of my teaching assignments right away in a community college was to teach across the four fields of anthropology so anthropology has biological anthropology linguistic anthropology culture anthropology and archaeology and so I was very quickly assigned to teach biological anthropology courses and was in fact worked in really developing those both as a as an in technologically in the online format and.

Technologically in the lab content including eventually working with DNA and so I.

That would slow down my dissertation so I I had gone back to the drawing board in essence on my dissertation and I'd start working at Edmunds I'd gone on leave I said now I had been a year or two of leave and.

I got a call for an email actually from bit Metcalf and I met Brent through Sunstone Symposia and I'd been very involved in the Sunstone dialogue crowd at that point in my career and so Brent had asked me for.

I references on someone and he said maybe you that would be willing to write an article about the new DNA evidence and its implications for the book of Mormon and so in my teaching biological anthropology I was familiar on at least a cursory level with that literature and for my own classes that I had in graduate school.

...