Marksism | Ep. 8: Seminaries and Integralism

By Mark Tooley & Marc LiVecche on July 10, 2020

In this episode of Marksism, Mark Tooley and Marc LiVecche discuss two articles published in Providence this week. First is Josh Mitchell’s response to some seminaries’ demanding moral leadership from the presidency. Josh Mitchell argues that moral leadership should come from seminaries and churches, rather than the government. Second is Daniel Strand’s response to Catholic integralist critiques of liberalism. While Strand sees some merit in these critiques, he argues that Catholic integralism, which argues the ideal polity is one in which the church is center to social and political life, is not the correct answer.

Mark Tooley is IRD’s president and editor of IRD’s foreign policy and national security journal, Providence. Prior to joining the IRD in 1994, Mark worked eight years for the Central Intelligence Agency. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and is a native of Arlington, Virginia. He is the author of Taking Back The United Methodist Church, published in 2008; Methodism and Politics in the 20th Century, published in 2012; and The Peace That Almost Was: The Forgotten Story of the 1861 Washington Peace Conference and the Final Attempt to Avert the Civil War, published in 2015.

Follow Mark on Twitter: @markdtooley

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.

Providence is the only publication devoted to Christian Realism in American foreign policy and is entirely funded by donor contributions. There are no advertisements, sponsorships, or paid posts to support the work of Providence, just readers who generously partner with Providence to keep our magazine running. If you would care to make a donation it would be highly appreciated to help Providence in advancing the Christian realist perspective in 2024. Thank you!

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