Marc LiVecche

Marc LiVecche (PhD, University of Chicago) 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 and adjunct professor of ethics at the US Naval Academy.

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. He has co-edited, both with Eric Patterson, Responsibility and Restraint: James Turner Johnson and the Just War Tradition, published by Stone Tower Press and Military Necessity and Just War Statecraft, published by Routledge. Currently, he is finalizing Moral Horror: A Just War Defense of the Bombing 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 lecturing on culture, moral philosophy, history, and theology at a 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 transient 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. He can be contacted at: mlivecche@providencemag.com

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Soldiers approaching Omaha during the Normandy invasion.
War Is Not Hell

God can be loved and worshipped on the battlefield, and pacifism as opposed to soldiering stands as an exception to the Christian norm.

Reception_of_Jews_in_Poland_1096
A Missed Opportunity

The recent surge in interest in moral injury has been largely motivated by psychiatric battle casualties suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan, but of course combat veterans throughout history have staggered home suffering not necessarily from physical injuries as classically perceived but injured all the same.

Uncle Sam Waterboarding
Always Wrong?

In the just war tradition, war (and therefore torture) are not only sometimes morally permissible but obligatory in order to restrain the enemy from sin.

2012 Giro d'Italia
Case Reasoning (& Wheel Changes)

A look at the Giro d’Italia and how exceptionless rules are also essential to bicycle races – as like perhaps to moral reasoning.

Pope Francis
Merchants of Death?

The headlines are exasperating, if a bit hyperbolic: Reuters writes, “Pope Says Weapons Manufacturers Can’t Call Themselves Christians” while the Daily Beast puts it, “Pope: Gun Makers Are Not Christians.”

Flags at Arlington National Cemetery.
Remembering Not To Forget

Reflections on how people choose to spend Memorial Day and how this relates to Christian pacifism.