Shows that pragmatic historicism is a significant intellectual tradition in the history of American religious and philosophical thought.Among the greatest challenges facing religious thinkers today is that created by historicism the notion that human beings and their myriad understandings of reality are utterly historical conditioned by contingent circumstances and tied to particular contexts. In this book Demian Wheeler confronts the historicist challenge by delineating and defending a particular trajectory of historicist thought known as pragmatic historicism. Rooted in the German Enlightenment and fully developed within the early Chicago school of theology pragmatic historicism is a predominantly American tradition that was philosophically nurtured by classical pragmatism and its intellectual siblings naturalism and radical empiricism.