One by one, the slides of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel cycled on the screen at the front of Princeton University's McCormick Hall — a thoughtful Heschel, a studious Heschel, a resolute Heschel marching arm-in-arm for civil rights in Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The slide show, prologue to Princeton's Oct. 16 centennial celebration of the towering 20th-century religious leader, reflected the many ways in which Heschel is remembered: for his innovative writings on theology, his political activism, and his scholarship.

More than 100 people filled the hall to hear tributes to Heschel from his daughter, Susannah; Rabbi Gordon Tucker of the Temple Israel Center in White Plains; and Cornel West, Class of 1943 Professor of Religion at Princeton.

The Princeton event was one of many celebrations around the country of the 100th anniversary of her father's birth, according to Susannah Heschel, who holds the Eli Black Chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.

The events have focused on Heschel's notable works of theology, including God in Search of Man; the 27 years he spent on the faculty at the Conservative movement's Jewish Theological Seminary; and his commitment to civil rights and outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War. He died in 1972.

The celebration at Princeton was sponsored by the university's Program in Judaic Studies and the Center for Jewish Life and served as the university's ninth annual Biderman Lecture.

"When I participate in s omething that celebrates my father, it's as if he comes back to life for that time," Susannah Heschel said in an interview as tears filled her eyes. "It means a lot to me. I love my father very much. I respect him very much."

Tucker noted in an interview that Heschel was a man whose influence extended well beyond the Jewish community.

"He combined a deep and penetrating scholarship with engagement in the world," said Tucker, the editor and translator of Heschel's Torah Min HaShamayim (Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations). "Not many people do both exceedingly well. It's a model to aspire to."

West expressed pleasure at the chance to participate in the tribute to Heschel. "It's just a tremendous blessing," he said. "He's just such a towering and prophetic figure of the 20th century. He's a soul mate of mine. I've learned so much from him — his courage, his vision, his compassion, his morality."

As the program got under way, West viewed Heschel through three lenses — the pietistic, the prophetic, and the poetic.

"What sits at the center of the great Heschel works is a very nuanced and subtle concept of piety," he said. "It is a deep indebtedness to those who came before."

Heschel was 33 when he emerged from the shadows of the Holocaust in 1940 and came to America, West said. "He'd already been shaped by Warsaw, by Berlin, by Frankfurt, and he'd been shaped by catastrophe, deep catastrophe."

Out of Heschel's confrontation with catastrophe came his deep sense of the prophetic spirit, West said.

"Most importantly, it has to do with a hypersensitivity to the suffering of others, which for him resides in the Hebrew Scriptures," he said. "How do you shatter the callousness toward this catastrophe? This is what I love about him so much: One of his foes was indifference to the wounds, the scars, the bruises of other people."

Heschel was also, in the deepest sense, a poet, according to West. "We're talking about those who have the courage to exercise their imagination and walk in the shoes of other people, thereby laying bare what they're experiencing," he said. "This is love in the deepest sense — service to others."

In that sense, Heschel possessed a kind of moral magnanimity, West said. "For Heschel, to be great is, in fact, to live a poetic life, a pietistic life, a prophetic life. The holy has to do with a creative vision of the poetic, the pietistic, and the prophetic in this very rich tradition of Judaism. To be a Jew is to be pietistic, prophetic, and, if possible, poetic — and if you can't write poetry, then live a poetic life."

Tucker, who received his doctorate in philosophy from Princeton in 1979, spoke about Heschel's deep interest in the possibility of speaking out with an unambiguous moral voice while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of dogmatism and religious fundamentalism.

"He was very, very deeply concerned with this broad issue," he said. "When he wrote on the subject of religious certainty, he talked about certainty being intuitive, not speculative. He said in a 1940s essay on the quest for certainty that not all that is evident is capable of being demonstrated. The essence of religious knowledge has to rely on some kind of intuitive insight."

For Heschel, the dilemma was how to reclaim the passion of prophecy without falling into fundamentalism, according to Tucker. Heschel wrote that responsiveness to God must be original to every soul — "which is to say, it is not the province of reason," he said.

For Susannah Heschel, the centennial celebration was an opportunity to bring her father alive through memory.

"I come to you as my father's daughter," she said. "I ask myself how my father experienced his own extraordinary life. He was a person of passion — very warm, very compassionate, very loving…. My father, when I look back, was remarkable in his commitment to all human beings."

Heschel said she also admires her father for the way he spoke out in righteous indignation against injustice — marching in demonstrations for the rescue of the Jews of Europe in the 1940s, against the Korean and Vietnam wars, and for civil rights.

When someone asked her father why he was participating in a demonstration against the Vietnam War, she said, he replied, "I'm here because I can't pray. Whenever I open a prayer book, I see pictures of children burning with napalm. How can I pray?"

For her father, she said, "to be a religious person, was to be engaged, to speak out in righteous indignation."

Asked by New Jersey Jewish News whether her father ever spoke to her about the ways in which marching against war and injustice had moved him, Heschel replied, "When my father came back from the march in Selma — a very important moment for him — he said, ‘I felt that my legs were praying. I felt a sense of holiness in that march.'"