This collection of essays provides careful analyses of the principal ideas expressed in a major church body formed in the United States, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). The authors locate the Disciples' theological tradition against a background of evolving intellectual history - from its immediate antecedents in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment through its birth in the American West of the early nineteenth century, to the various challenges of modernism over the past 120 years. Through it all the authors in this collection trace the essential themes that have given the denomination continuity and strength.