Marc LiVecche is the McDonald Distinguished Scholar of Ethics, War, and Public Life at Providence. He is also a non-resident research fellow at the US Naval War College, in the College of Leadership and Ethics.
Marc completed doctoral studies, earning distinction, at the University of Chicago, where he worked under the supervision of the political theorist and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain, until her death in August, 2013. His first book, The Good Kill: Just War & Moral Injury, was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press. Another project, Responsibility and Restraint: James Turner Johnson and the Just War Tradition, co-edited with Eric Patterson, was published by Stone Tower Press in the fall of 2020. Currently, he is finalizing Moral Horror: A Just War Defense of Hiroshima. Before all this academic stuff, Marc spent twelve years doing a variety of things in Central Europe—ranging from helping build sport and recreational leagues in post-communist communities, to working at a Christian study and research center, to leading seminars on history and ethics onsite at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp in Poland. This latter experience allowed him to continue his undergraduate study of the Shoah; a process which rendered him entirely ill-suited for pacifism.
Marc lives in Annapolis, Maryland with his wife and children–and a marmota monax whistlepigging under the shed. He can be followed, or stalked, on twitter @mlivecche. Additional publications can be found at his Amazon author page.
William Brodrick’s “A Whispered Name” is a lyrical reflection on responsibility, judgment, grief, the elusiveness of justice, reconciliation, and human longing.
Marc LiVeccheMay 4, 2020
Last week marked the 75th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Iwo Jima. The Japanese intended to make the American cost of taking the island so severe they would reconsider invading the Japanese home islands. On this point, the Japanese condemned themselves by their very success. The shadow of Iwo Jima is arguably a mushroom cloud.
Marc LiVeccheApril 3, 2020
Albert Camus’ The Plague is a study of how the various townspeople relate to one another during a catastrophe. The book has always been good for reflection, but now it’s truly a mirror.
Marc LiVeccheMarch 19, 2020
Marc LiVecche—executive editor of Providence and the McDonald Visiting Scholar at the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, & Public Life at Christ Church, Oxford University—discusses how Christian can use violence in the pursuit of peace following the just war tradition.
Marc LiVeccheMarch 9, 2020
Heather Curtis’ Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicalism and Global Aid reveals the crucial role evangelicals played in the development of international humanitarianism at a time when the United States was extending its global power through economic expansion, military imperialism, and missionary outreach
Marc LiVeccheFebruary 14, 2020
What will be lost to many—including too many Christians—is the fact that this pledge of “never again” is, if it is to mean anything at all, a promise to fight if, in the last resort and with the aim of peace, nothing else will protect the innocent, requite an injustice, or punish evil.
Marc LiVeccheJanuary 27, 2020
How should Christians respond to the killing of someone so monstrous that their death seems to be a net gain for the world, a victory for the goods of justice, order, and peace?
Marc LiVeccheJanuary 24, 2020
Like many, my reaction to the killing of Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani has been an admixture of satisfaction and apprehension.
Marc LiVeccheJanuary 10, 2020
Pope Francis visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki this weekend. In both locations, he lamented the horrors and immorality of nuclear weapons. He got the horror right, not much else.
Marc LiVeccheNovember 25, 2019
Over the nearly four years running from December 1940 to September 1944, the inhabitants of the French village of Le…
Marc LiVeccheOctober 2, 2019
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