Joseph Bracken examines key writings of process-oriented philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead along with systems-oriented thinkers such as Ludwig von Bertalanffy to create a systems-oriented understanding of the God-world relation that serves as a complement to Pope Francis’s reflections on the environmental crisis.

A field‐oriented interpretation of Whiteheadian societies of actual occasions, when used to explain the notion of “strong supervenience” as applied to the mind‐brain problem, allows one to claim that not only higher‐level properties such as consciousness but even higher‐level entities such as the mind or soul are emergent from lower‐level systems of neuronal interaction. Moreover, it also explains the preexistence of God to the world and Christian belief in eternal life with the triune God in a way that is impossible (...) within the limits of a theory of strong supervenience. (shrink)