Joseph A. Bracken

Q: When did Joseph A. Bracken die?

Joseph A. Bracken died on April 13, 2024.

Q: How old was Joseph A. Bracken when they died?

Joseph A. Bracken was 94 years old at the time of death.

Joseph A. Bracken, S.J. (March 22, 1930 – April 13, 2024) was an American philosopher and Catholic theologian. Bracken was a proponent of process philosophy and process theology of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. Much of his work is devoted to a synthesis of revealed religion and Christian trinitarian doctrines with a revised process theology. Bracken introduced a field theoretic approach to process metaphysics.

Biography

Bracken was born on 22 March 1930 in Chicago, Illinois on March 22, 1930.

Bracken graduated from Saint Ignatius College Prep in Chicago in 1948 and attended Loyola University Chicago for one year before entering the Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus on August 18, 1949, at St. Stanislaus Jesuit novitiate in Florissant, Missouri. He was ordained a priest on June 10, 1962, at West Baden College in West Baden Springs, Indiana, and pronounced final vows on February 2, 1967, at St. Blasien Church in Germany.

Bracken was emeritus Professor of Theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He received his PhD from the University of Freiburg in Germany in 1968, and taught at University of Saint Mary of the Lake Mundelein Seminary in Illinois (1968–1974), and at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1974–1982), before becoming Chairman of the Theology Department at Xavier in 1982.

Bracken died in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin on April 13, 2024, at the age of 94.

Work

Bracken was the author and/or editor of 11 books and wrote about 150 articles in academic journals.

He briefly summarized his approach in a book review in 2007: This is why in my own rethinking of Whitehead's metaphysics I presumed from the start that his metaphysical categories needed revision in order to accommodate Christian belief in God as Trinity. With this in mind, I soon realized that Whitehead's key category of "society" needed further development. A "society," after all, must be more than an aggregate of actual occasions with a "common element of form" (PR 1968, 34) if philosophical atomism is to be avoided. My own solution was to reinterpret a Whiteheadian society as an enduring structured field of activity for successive generations of constituent actual occasions. Thus understood, a Whiteheadian "society" serves both to legitimate a trinitarian process-oriented understanding of God and to make Whitehead's philosophy an even stronger social ontology than he himself envisioned. That is, "the final real things of which the world is made up" are not simply actual occasions but the societies into which they spontaneously aggregate.