Marc LiVecche

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.

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flourishing freedom liberty
Bound to Be Free: Liberty & Human Flourishing

From the fall, 2016 print edition: Christians long to be free in order to be obedient

London terror
On Living in An Age of Terror

Old Help for Current Troubles

An Ode to Men of a Violent Mold: Logan, a review

A profoundly violent, sublimely beautiful film

Toward a Christian View of Nationalism

Patriotism, nationalism, and jingoism are individually important terms that do discreet, if sometimes overlapping work. I’m just not entirely sure how.

Weekly Newsletter: Lack of Resolve As National Security Crisis

The greatest threat we face is our unwillingness to face them

Hacksaw Ridge Review Redux: The Director’s Cut

Nominated this week for six Oscars, Mel Gibson’s Desmond Doss biopic is an extraordinary testimony to extraordinary valor

The Nod to Genocide: Holocausts Are Chosen

75 years ago, fifteen well-educated men met in Berlin to talk murder

Inaugural Reflections & National Service

The perpetuation of our national institutions does not automatically–nor cheaply

Reinhold Niebuhr’s Community of Common Responsibility

75 years ago Reinhold Niebuhr rejoiced that America had finally resolved to do her duty

The Fifth Image: Seeing the Enemy with Just War Eyes
The Fifth Image: Seeing the Enemy with Just War Eyes

In the Christian view, the normative grounding from which the tradition of just war casuistry springs is the dominical command to love.

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Christianity & National Security 2023

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