James P. Mackey was a liberal Catholic theologian who held the Thomas Chalmers chair of theology at the University of Edinburgh from 1979 until his retiral in 1999.
[1] He attended the Christian Brothers School in his home town of Dungarvan before completing his secondary education at the Cistercian College in Roscrea.
[2][4] He moved back to Waterford in 1966 to teach at St John's seminary and went on to work as Professor of Systematic and Philosophical Theology at the University of San Francisco from 1973 to 1979.
[3] For much of the 20th century, the Faculty of Divinity of the University of Edinburgh, situated at New College on The Mound was primarily considered to be a seminary for the training of ministers in the Church of Scotland.
[9] At his inaugural lecture in October 1979, Mackey assured his detractors that they had nothing to fear and treated the situation with humour, joking that he "could have gone down in history as perhaps the only man to be dismissed from a Chair three days before he was appointed to it".