To longtime readers of Ad Fontes, thank you for supporting us through a long hiatus and much transition. To newcomers, welcome!
This relaunch of the publication reaches ‘back to the sources’ of the Davenant Institute and the energies that first launched “A Journal of Protestant Letters.” Ad Fontes set out to mine the riches of the classical and Christian traditions for wisdom to face the questions we encounter today, both within the walls of our various magisterial Protestant communions and in our shared commonwealth. The aim was not antiquarian nostalgia, but the patient retrieval of truths still capable of forming free peoples and faithful churches in the service of Christ.
That mission continues, with a renewed commitment to platforming a range of voices—some familiar to longtime friends of Davenant, some new—who in their public scholarship and debate can help advance our pursuit of wisdom as iron sharpens iron.
In the spirit of public discourse, we are transitioning from print subscriptions to an online open-access model. Every quarter, our new issue will be published on the homepage with individually navigable articles. Later that month, a printable version of the latest issue will be available as the latest entry in our Archive. We will feature more time-sensitive essays and responses to our quarterly issues on a rolling basis under the heading Commentary. Our long-running blogs will continue under their own heading. If you are interested in receiving our periodic newsletters featuring new content, please join our army of friends and subscribe. If you have an essay pitch that you would like us to consider, please see our Submissions page.
In his great novel Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy lampoons the discourse of highbrow drawing rooms through the pretensions of Princess Shcherbatsky, “who, in case a topic was lacking, always kept two heavy cannon in reserve—classical versus modern education, and general military conscription.” We will hope that the course of events does not require us to dust off the second cannon, but will risk the satirist’s irony and try to say something useful about the first.
The “Christian classical education movement” has grown from a trickle of eccentrics who thirty-odd years ago began seeking alternative ways to form the hearts and minds of their children, armed with little more than Dorothy Sayers’ “Lost Tools of Learning” and perhaps a copy of Credenda Agenda, to a flood of publishers, books, curricula, and conferences. To some extent, the movement’s coherence has become a victim of its own success. Put headmasters from the A.C.C.S., Great Hearts, Chesterton Networks, Valor, and I.C.L.E. in the same room and ask them to agree on what it means to educate “classically,” and where exactly “Christian” fits in that. Or ask the tiger-moms of the local homeschooling support group to write a shared statement of purpose. Whose ‘classical’? Which Christianity? We know from experience how primed this particular cannon, loaded as it is with ideas of eternal significance, is to go off.
This issue, then, is an attempt to engage those competing ideals while bringing the conversation down to earth in practical ways. In our first section, “Church & Society,” Carl Young’s essay provides a foundation by tracing the enduring tension between a philosophical and a civic education found throughout classical writings on the formation of the young. In so doing, he underlines the impossibility of using “classical” as if the Greeks and Romans spoke homogeneously, while drawing out key areas of overlap. My essay takes up that story and extends it both to the tension between the City of God and the City of Man in Augustine’s educational program, and its evolution into the utopian Renaissance humanist attempt (still influential today) to wed both cities in the pursuit of “universal knowledge.” Miles Smith traces the competing claims of secular and ecclesiastical education in the American founding, and the importance of that history for contemporary Christian parents. Mikael Good weaves together many of these strands—classical and Christian, theological and political—in her response to Harvey Mansfield’s new book, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control.
Josh Patch introduces our “Arts & Poetry” section with an essay on the importance of satire in a liberal education, arguing that we must pursue serious things without taking ourselves so seriously. In honor of Frederick Buechner’s 100th birthday, Jon Balsbaugh reintroduces us to the earthy, profanely funny Reformed novelist who taught him Christian sanctity. The issue concludes with original poetry that draws inspiration from the tradition of Reformation-era sacred lyric while experimenting with contemporary forms.
We hope you are provoked and edified by what you find here.
Patrick Timmis, Senior Editor
