Welcome to the Ad Fontes website.
This website marks an important development in the life of our journal. A publication of the Davenant Institute, Ad Fontes was founded in 2016 with the goal of mining the best sources of the Protestant tradition for the good of the Church today. We believed then and we believe now that renewing the contemporary Church begins with retrieval. But retrieval is never enough; true renewal makes a further claim upon us: synthesis. We must take up the riches of our tradition, but in so doing we must articulate them anew, apply them creatively, and, ultimately, make them ours.
It was with this in mind that we began planning a relaunch of Ad Fontes nearly a year ago. Beginning earlier this year with The Ad Fontes Podcast, continuing with this website launch, and culminating in the redesign of our print journal at the end of this summer, we have undertaken a top-to-bottom refresh of our offerings. We have done all of this so that we might not simply return to the sources, but think through the sources, to see the world through lenses informed by classical Protestantism. Our aim is nothing less than to appropriate and apply the riches of our Protestant heritage to the whole of reality, in all of its complexity and variegation. In so doing, we plan to engage with our forebears as guides who assist us as we grow up into the full stature of those competent to reason not merely from the tradition, but with it.
From the beginning, the Davenant Institute has pursued this mission by cultivating an “army of friends,” and it brings me great joy to say that I have invited several longtime friends of the Institute to host blogs on this site. Their diverse interests and areas of expertise will add deep and broad richness to the conversations advancing in the pages of Ad Fontes.
The Davenant Institute’s President and Founder Brad Littlejohn is hosting a blog on political theology and contemporary politics; E.J. Hutchinson, Associate Professor of Classics at Hillsdale College, will focus his blog on the ancient classical and early modern periods; John Ahern, a doctoral student at Princeton University studying early modern music, has undertaken to write for us on worship and church music, historical and contemporary; Miles Smith is a lecturer in history at Hillsdale College whose interests lie in modern American and European history; Joseph Minich is a Teaching Fellow at the Davenant Institute and an author who focuses upon the causes of modernity and secularity, the plausibility of atheism in the modern world, and the means of living well as Christians today; Editorial Fellow at the Davenant Press, Rhys Laverty, will be arguing for the crucial practicality of theological retrieval for pastors, church ministries, and laypeople alike.
Content which is exclusive to the website will be freely available to all readers. The majority of articles which appear in our quarterly print edition (usually our longest and most thorough pieces) will be available only to paid subscribers, and you can find the different subscription packages outlined on the website.
We are delighted that you are here, and we hope you will join us as we seek to reason together, upholding the heritage of the Reformation and championing the faith once delivered to the saints.
In our Lord,
Onsi A. Kamel
Editor-in-Chief