The Alice L. Walton School of Medicine is reshaping medical education by training physicians in a four-year MD program grounded in whole-health principles. It focuses not only on the treatment of disease, but on nurturing physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual well-being, blending traditional training with wisdom from the arts and the natural world. The guiding principles of the school are empathy, self-care, humanism, entrepreneurialism, and a community focus. Its first class began in July, 2025.
Process-relational philosophers will naturally be drawn to this vision for many reasons: its recognition (1) that the arts and sciences can work together, (2) that we humans dwell within, not apart from, a larger web of life, (3) that the aesthetic dimension of life is as important as the informational dimensions, and (4) that empathy and creativity and community are recipes for a healthy life, and (5) that learning is shaped by context and does not occur only in the classroom
The Campus as Teacher, including a Museum
In the latter regard, the campus itself becomes a teacher—an environment that invites creativity, reflection, and connection with the living world. The campus includes not only the buildings of the medical school but also the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the surrounding trails and gardens, creating a landscape where art, architecture, and nature come together as partners in education.
As the school’s architects explain,
“Our team envisioned a building deeply inspired by the Ozark landscape—its limestone bluffs, forested trails, and natural shelters—a building that wouldn’t just sit on the land but arise out of it, a building that belongs here. The resulting form is an abstraction of Ozark geology. The building’s cantilevered structure is a reflection of the natural bluff shelters of our region. And just as they served people thousands of years ago, this modern-day shelter invites the community into a space of healing and learning. It reflects the school’s mission to care for the whole person.” ¹
The Green Roof
That natural inspiration continues on the roof, where Arkansas’s largest green roof—essentially a park complete with benches and water features—extends the vision of harmony between human and natural life. Designed by Polk Stanley Wilcox, in collaboration with OSD landscape architects and installed with the help of Ozark Green Roofs, the two-acre canopy turns the top of the building into a living classroom: a space for renewal, conversation, and contemplation beneath the open sky.
Alice Walton herself describes the deeper purpose behind this integration of art, nature, and health:
“The new school will explore the intersection between art and healthcare. Because I think they need each other.… When we founded this school, it was based on a vision for a new kind of med school—one that would transform the next generation of physicians based on what communities need now. Not just disease care, but whole-person care.… I envisioned having it on this campus, where students, staff, and faculty would be surrounded by art, nature, and amazing architecture.” ¹
For those of us drawn to process-relational philosophy, this is medicine understood as relationship and creative transformation—where healing is not confined to the clinic but becomes a way of life. The architecture itself embodies the process idea of beauty as the harmony of contrasts: natural and built, scientific and artistic, technological and spiritual. It is a living illustration of Whitehead’s insight that the aim of education—and indeed of existence—is the cultivation of beauty, understood as the deep satisfaction that arises when diversity, intensity, and harmony come together in creative advance.
Does process philosophy offer anything to this vision besides appreciation? I think it does. Perhaps there are at least five emphases that can lend support and depth to the whole-health vision embodied by the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine.
1. A Cosmological Context for Healing
Process philosophy situates the work of medicine within a living universe—a world vibrant and alive with beauty, feeling, and creativity. The training of physicians can thus be understood as taking place within this larger cosmological context: the healing arts as expressions of the universe’s own creative advance toward life and harmony. Education, then, is not only professional preparation but participation in the ongoing creativity of the cosmos itself.
2. A Spacious Understanding of Spirituality
Process thinkers recognize that spirituality, which the medical school rightly emphasizes, need not be confined to any single religious tradition. Spirituality can be understood in multi-religious or even non-religious terms—as the cultivation of gratitude, compassion, mystery, empathy, silence, wonder, playfulness, and beauty. These are universal ways of touching the spiritual side of life, open to all people regardless of belief or affiliation.
3. The Interdependence of Individual and Communal Health
In a process view, the health of an individual and the health of a community are inseparable. We are whole as persons only insofar as we are richly related to others—human and more-than-human alike. Healing thus includes social connection, justice, and care for the Earth. To promote personal well-being without attention to communal and ecological well-being is to miss the larger field in which life itself flourishes.
4. Creativity as the Essence of Life
Process philosophy emphasizes creativity—not merely as a human trait but as a fundamental feature of the universe itself. Every act of healing, every discovery, every compassionate gesture participates in this creative movement. Physicians and caregivers are co-creators with the world, joining in its ongoing renewal.
5. The Connection Between Beauty and Healing
For process thought, beauty is the telos of the universe—the deep aim toward harmony and vitality that underlies all becoming. To be whole, psychologically and physically, is to experience and participate in beauty understood not as mere appearance but as the felt harmony of contrasts, the dynamic balance of intensity and peace. Healing, in this view, is the restoration or emergence of beauty in life. Medicine, then, becomes a work of art as well as science: the cultivation of balance, vitality, and harmony within the larger rhythm of the living world.
These five themes—a living cosmos, a broad spirituality, the interdependence of all health, creativity as essential to life, and beauty as the telos of healing—do not replace the school’s vision but reinforce it. They remind us that medicine, like philosophy, is at its best when it honors the fullness of life and the beauty of becoming.
¹ Quotes and descriptive details from Jack Travis, “Alice L. Walton School of Medicine Opens, Blending Art, Nature, and Health.”
Process-relational philosophers will naturally be drawn to this vision for many reasons: its recognition (1) that the arts and sciences can work together, (2) that we humans dwell within, not apart from, a larger web of life, (3) that the aesthetic dimension of life is as important as the informational dimensions, and (4) that empathy and creativity and community are recipes for a healthy life, and (5) that learning is shaped by context and does not occur only in the classroom
The Campus as Teacher, including a Museum
In the latter regard, the campus itself becomes a teacher—an environment that invites creativity, reflection, and connection with the living world. The campus includes not only the buildings of the medical school but also the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the surrounding trails and gardens, creating a landscape where art, architecture, and nature come together as partners in education.
As the school’s architects explain,
“Our team envisioned a building deeply inspired by the Ozark landscape—its limestone bluffs, forested trails, and natural shelters—a building that wouldn’t just sit on the land but arise out of it, a building that belongs here. The resulting form is an abstraction of Ozark geology. The building’s cantilevered structure is a reflection of the natural bluff shelters of our region. And just as they served people thousands of years ago, this modern-day shelter invites the community into a space of healing and learning. It reflects the school’s mission to care for the whole person.” ¹
The Green Roof
That natural inspiration continues on the roof, where Arkansas’s largest green roof—essentially a park complete with benches and water features—extends the vision of harmony between human and natural life. Designed by Polk Stanley Wilcox, in collaboration with OSD landscape architects and installed with the help of Ozark Green Roofs, the two-acre canopy turns the top of the building into a living classroom: a space for renewal, conversation, and contemplation beneath the open sky.
Alice Walton herself describes the deeper purpose behind this integration of art, nature, and health:
“The new school will explore the intersection between art and healthcare. Because I think they need each other.… When we founded this school, it was based on a vision for a new kind of med school—one that would transform the next generation of physicians based on what communities need now. Not just disease care, but whole-person care.… I envisioned having it on this campus, where students, staff, and faculty would be surrounded by art, nature, and amazing architecture.” ¹
For those of us drawn to process-relational philosophy, this is medicine understood as relationship and creative transformation—where healing is not confined to the clinic but becomes a way of life. The architecture itself embodies the process idea of beauty as the harmony of contrasts: natural and built, scientific and artistic, technological and spiritual. It is a living illustration of Whitehead’s insight that the aim of education—and indeed of existence—is the cultivation of beauty, understood as the deep satisfaction that arises when diversity, intensity, and harmony come together in creative advance.
Does process philosophy offer anything to this vision besides appreciation? I think it does. Perhaps there are at least five emphases that can lend support and depth to the whole-health vision embodied by the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine.
1. A Cosmological Context for Healing
Process philosophy situates the work of medicine within a living universe—a world vibrant and alive with beauty, feeling, and creativity. The training of physicians can thus be understood as taking place within this larger cosmological context: the healing arts as expressions of the universe’s own creative advance toward life and harmony. Education, then, is not only professional preparation but participation in the ongoing creativity of the cosmos itself.
2. A Spacious Understanding of Spirituality
Process thinkers recognize that spirituality, which the medical school rightly emphasizes, need not be confined to any single religious tradition. Spirituality can be understood in multi-religious or even non-religious terms—as the cultivation of gratitude, compassion, mystery, empathy, silence, wonder, playfulness, and beauty. These are universal ways of touching the spiritual side of life, open to all people regardless of belief or affiliation.
3. The Interdependence of Individual and Communal Health
In a process view, the health of an individual and the health of a community are inseparable. We are whole as persons only insofar as we are richly related to others—human and more-than-human alike. Healing thus includes social connection, justice, and care for the Earth. To promote personal well-being without attention to communal and ecological well-being is to miss the larger field in which life itself flourishes.
4. Creativity as the Essence of Life
Process philosophy emphasizes creativity—not merely as a human trait but as a fundamental feature of the universe itself. Every act of healing, every discovery, every compassionate gesture participates in this creative movement. Physicians and caregivers are co-creators with the world, joining in its ongoing renewal.
5. The Connection Between Beauty and Healing
For process thought, beauty is the telos of the universe—the deep aim toward harmony and vitality that underlies all becoming. To be whole, psychologically and physically, is to experience and participate in beauty understood not as mere appearance but as the felt harmony of contrasts, the dynamic balance of intensity and peace. Healing, in this view, is the restoration or emergence of beauty in life. Medicine, then, becomes a work of art as well as science: the cultivation of balance, vitality, and harmony within the larger rhythm of the living world.
These five themes—a living cosmos, a broad spirituality, the interdependence of all health, creativity as essential to life, and beauty as the telos of healing—do not replace the school’s vision but reinforce it. They remind us that medicine, like philosophy, is at its best when it honors the fullness of life and the beauty of becoming.
¹ Quotes and descriptive details from Jack Travis, “Alice L. Walton School of Medicine Opens, Blending Art, Nature, and Health.”