István Kamarás is a sociologist of religion, a writer, and a professor. He was born in 1941 in Munkács (today Mukacsevo, Ukraine). He was a member of an illegal Catholic movement in Szentimreváros. After having completed high school, he couldn’t attend university, because he had studied the Bible and he wasn’t a member of the working class or the child of a peasant family. After working as a physical labourer for two years, he was accepted by an institution of higher education. He graduated from the Hungarian-Library Department of Eötvös Loránd University. He was a member of the staff of the university periodical Tiszta Szívvel (“With a Pure Heart,” an allusion to a poem by Attila József), which caused a political scandal. In the periodical, people whose mentalities differed from what was expected by the regime criticized the socialist system. Some of these people later on became famous writers and intellectuals. He studied aesthetics at the Marxist-Leninist Evening University and sociology at Eötvös Loránd University. His first workplace was in the Archival Group in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and between 1968 and 1985 he worked at the Reading Research Class in the Centre of Library Sciences and Methodology of the National Széchényi Library, where he mainly pursued research on the sociology of reading. In 1985, he was given a position at the Cultural Research Centre, where he pursued research on the sociology of religion. Between 1990 and 1995, he worked at the National Educational Institute, and from 1996 to 1998 he was a professor at the Teachers’ Training Institute of the Janus Pannonius University of Sciences. He also taught at Pannon University (1999–2010), where he founded the Department of Anthropology and Ethics. He published several works of literature (the first was published in 1965), and he wrote many storybooks and novels.