Robert Walter: Mythology, Health and Healing

Robert Walter 

Mythology, Health and Healing

Following in Campbell’s footsteps, we will discuss the overlap and influence of one’s spiritual beliefs, mythology and the healing response.

Join us for this special plenary in which Robert Walter will help us explore the relationship between mythology and health: how the visceral beliefs – the myths – of both patient and physician interact to either positively impact or impede their interpersonal relationship and, more importantly, the healing process itself.

We will also investigate some of the biological bases for such mythic understandings and scrutinize the ways in which technological development, globalisation, and mass media are continually redefining and reshaping our understanding of what it means to be “healthy”.

Robert further ‘diagnoses’ the well-being of the body politic by examining how our contemporary mythos – whether consciously articulated or unacknowledged – fails to inform our lives with the art of living due to an insistent denial of death and the inevitability of our dying.

Robert Walter is the board president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving, protecting, and expanding on the works of Joseph Campbell. In 1979, after a decade of working in the arts education and professional theatre fields, he became editorial director of Joseph Campbell’s Historical Atlas of World Mythology. He was also the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s first executive director and was appointed its president in 1998.

He was a founding Trustee of United Religions Initiative in 1999, serving as its treasurer and on its Global Council. Since 2005, he has facilitated a monthly meeting of Baptist pastors that began under a program known as Together in Ministry. He has presented papers, given talks and offered seminars and workshops on five continents. He has also been featured in several films and as a commentator on the History Channel.