Thomas Luckmann was born in Slovenia and was educated at the universities of Vienna and Innsbruck in Austria and at the New School for Social Research in the United States. A professor of sociology, he has taught in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research (New York) and at the University of Constance, Germany (among other institutions). His work focuses mainly on social theory with significant implications for the sociology of religion and also for philosophy and sociology in general.

Luckmann is widely viewed as an interesting figure in the historical trajectory of secularization theory, not the least for his markedly open-ended, functional definition of religion. In his The Invisible Religion (1967; originally published in 1963 in German as Das problem der Religion), ...