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When Abraham Joshua Heschel died in late December 1972, the world lost a major figure in contemporary Judaism—but it lost more than that, too. Heschel was one of the most popular and incisive midcentury religious figures in any religion, almost as popular among Christians as among his fellow Jews. He was a prominent supporter of the Civil Rights movement and a personal friend of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his work influenced later public intellectuals from Cornel West to Walter Brueggemann.

Our guest today on Christian Humanist Profiles is Robert Erlewine, whose latest book is Thunder in the Soul, an anthology of Heschel’s writings and part of Plough Books’s Spiritual Guides series.