Slightly old news now, but many congratulations to fellow Alastair McIntosh on his PhD by publication from the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages (AICH) at the University of Ulster. His thesis was entitled Some Contributions of Liberation Theology to Community Empowerment in Scottish Land Reform 1991 - 2003, and was examined and passed without revisions on 28 June 2008. The full text can be found on his website, www.alastairmcintosh.com.

On his website, Alastair writes: some important theoretical aspects evolved in the context of my submitting a dozen of my previously published works [...] As a Visiting Fellow of AICH this entailed writing a "short" (it grew in the making) thesis linking material published over the previous decade and showing how it collectively constituted a PhD. However, in the course of pulling it all together my supervisors challenged and assisted me into exploring more deeply what I meant by such expressions as "spirituality" and in particular, its relationship to "essentialism." It became for me a very valuable exercise in its own right - a taking of stock of where I'd got to and a consolidation of that ground.