On May 10th 2016 Thomas Luckmann died of cancer. He was certainly one of the most prominent sociologists of religion whose theory has been received all over the globe. Born in Jesenice, Slovenia, he went to school in Vienna.
After his first semesters in Vienna and Innsbruck, he moved to the New School of Social Research in New York. Trained by scholars such as Alfred Schutz, he became one of the leading figures in what became to be called the “new” sociology of knowledge. His “Social Construction of Reality”, co-authored with
Peter Berger in 1966, influenced many social scientific disciplines, the humanities and various academic movements, such as “social constructionism”, “social constructivism” or the “new institutionalism”. The “Invisible Religion”, published in 1967, became immediately a classic text in the Sociology of Religion. It formulated one of the most inclusive theories of religion as being based in human’s capacity to transcend the biological organism. After his “Structures of the Life-World”, co-authored with Alfred Schutz, he added a differentiated concept of transcendences which was included in the later versions of the “Invisible Religion”. Throughout his life, Luckmann has been conducting a range of empirical studies, also in the sociology religion, which increasingly focused on communicative processes and genres.
Thomas Luckmann has been an eminent researcher and an influential teacher whose theory built a bridge between various disciplines, yet he also built a bridge between European and American traditions concerned with the study of religion. We will miss his thoughtful lectures, his huge knowledge, his deep reflections and his warm presence.
Hubert Knoblauch and Bernt Schnettler
