For me, 2024 was the year of Cormac McCarthy. For this, I am largely indebted to my former Ad Fontes colleagues Colin Redemer and Onsi Kamel, who had been pushing me to dive into the works of the great American novelist for a while. Eventually, I got sick of not getting their references and having to ask them to keep me spoiler-free, and so it began. I concluded 2023 by reading The Road, a novel I had tried once before as a younger man but not gotten along with. This time though, it landed differently. I knew I had encountered one of the greats, and was at last in a position to appreciate him.

And so, throughout 2024, as part of a general return to regularly reading novels for the first time in some years, I read through McCarthy’s Border trilogy—All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). Each of these, I know already, will repay numerous rereadings. For one thing, they are rich texts for anyone well read in philosophy, containing passages and exchanges that would sit comfortably in any Platonic dialogue, dealing with the Good, form and matter, virtue, and more.

But that which has stayed with me more than anything else since finishing the trilogy is its elegiac quality. The protagonists, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, are old souls in young bodies, coming of age in a pre-technocratic world of cattle ranching, horse riding, and animal tracking in the American South just as its death knells are sounding around the time of World War Two. In the opening pages of The Crossing, a wolf, a threat long thought vanquished, plagues Billy’s family ranch. The only man in the region who knew how to deal with wolves has died of old age. And so Billy (a talented tracker, but no wolf-whisperer) is left to search through the old man’s baits, mysterious scents gathered and concocted as part of a now inaccessible craft. The vestiges of a lost civilisation (and that is not too grand a word) in a New Mexico shack in midcentury. Billy does a fine job of tracking the wolf, no doubt, but the reader intimates that he will never be able to recreate what once was. The bottles of scent will eventually run dry. Billy is the victim of a progress trap. Ranchers had done such a thorough job of eliminating wolves that tracking and trapping them had become almost obsolete. This scene impressed upon me a recurrent theme of the Border trilogy: the stubborn and ultimate refusal of the world to ever really change. The wolves come back. Or if not them, something just as bad if not worse. As one character tells John Grady in All the Pretty Horses, “In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.” Eduardo, the villain of Cities of the Plain, says similarly “Men have in their minds a picture of the way the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.” And this is all because of what Mr. Johnson, an old man in the early stages of dementia in that same novel, realizes is the hardest lesson in life to learn: “Maybe it’s just that when things are gone, they’re gone. They ain’t comin back.”

These thoughts are provocative for those of us whose daily work involves retrieving things from the past. That, after all, is the mission of the Davenant Institute: to retrieve the riches of classical Protestantism to renew and build up the contemporary church. It is all too easy to imagine that “retrieval” means recreating a lost world. But lost worlds are just that: lost. Now, to be sure, that doesn’t mean we cannot through retrieval bring about change that makes the world of tomorrow more like the world of yesterday, even in ways that may seem unthinkable today. But even when that happens, such things will be possessed as things retrieved, rather than as things unquestionably received and to which no alternative is imaginable, even if they are things which are in fact givens of the created order. Lord willing, we may live to see the day when the last traces of anything resembling transgenderism are cast down into the rot of history in a fireball of top-down legislation and bottom-up social stigma, thanks to a societal retrieval of God’s design for sex and gender. But, for at least a few generations, we will be dogged by the knowledge that society, dreadfully and unforgivably, tried something else. However much we men of today try to make tomorrow resemble yesterday, it will never quite be so. Yet if we keep this thought in our minds, there’s no reason we cannot carry on with a mission of retrieval. We must simply hold our nerve and remember that true retrieval is not mere recreation.

And that is why you have another issue of Ad Fontes before you. I am pleased to draw together a diverse range of essays, reviews, and poetry once again. In our opening piece, Joseph Whitenton offers a fresh assessment of seventeenth century Anglican devotion, against those who see this as a Romanzing period for the English church. Leaping forward, Eddie LaRow then considers how Bob Dylan’s gospel phase fits into his wider musical career. Nathan Tarr then offers a stirring reflection on the role of the seminary today, before I join the fray with a rebuttal to over-simplistic critiques of Protestantism’s role in environmental issues. In our reviews, E.J. Hutchinson provides a typically fine-grained analysis of a recent Melanchthon translation, picking some expert holes. The renowned Louis Markos then opens up Charles Taylor’s latest work, before Stephen Sills picks apart an important recent work on natural law. And throughout the issue, we are pleased to feature two poems by Betsy Howard.

I am sorry once again that our print edition is coming a season late, with Fall’s issue arriving in Winter. Lord willing, this will be the last instance, and the Winter edition will be with you before Spring has begun in earnest.

Rhys Laverty

Senior Editor