Health disparities are differences in disease prevalence, mortality rates, and adverse health outcomes across social demographics. The prevalence of health disparities stems from sociopolitical inequities that contribute to the ongoing marginalization of different communities, the majority of which occur along racial and ethnic lines in the United States. As moral wrongs in need of moral repair, health disparities can be addressed in one of six ways, articulated in the scholarship of Margaret Urban Walker: (1) holding wrongdoers responsible; (2) addressing the harms imposed on victims; (3) instating moral terms and standards into harmed communities to regain their trust in social mechanisms meant to protect them; (4) recreating trust among harmed communities rooted in new norms; (5) nourishing hope; and (6) bringing together victims and wrongdoers. This dissertation engages the aforementioned morally reparative steps to redress the moral wrong of health disparities in the United States through proposed policy, educational, and clinical interventions. This dissertation examines health disparities from four perspectives. First, it employs a sociohistorical lens to chart the history of health disparities in the United States and the complex social factors contributing to their prevalence. Second, it uses international rights rhetoric of the United Nations and its supporting committees to examine methods of accountability from the United States aimed at reducing disparities and inequities. Third, the dissertation applies the lens of Jacques Maritain’s ontologically informed personalism to reclaim personhood as a viable concept that attends to the sacrality of humanity and our status as social and political beings. Fourth, the dissertation applies the historical, rights, and personalist perspectives in a case study centering black birthing people as an exemplary demographic plagued by racially impacted health disparities and in need of moral repair. This dissertation uses the four-perspective approach to conclude with a morally reparative framework aimed at eliminating health disparities through constructive healthcare policy, practice, and educational measures affirming personhood, human dignity, universal human rights, and health for all people.

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Christ can be understood as a mirror, connecting humanity and God in his image into a hybrid entity, without eliminating the difference. The complex reality is mirrored through Christ transcending the border between subjectivity and objectivity, human and God, ourselves and others. This study is a form of constructive theology that aims to construct a transformative christological conceptual model, which can contribute to theology as a power critical epistemological deconstruction. It does this through the method of critical and comparative text analysis.  The study consists of two main sections, analysis and the discussion. The analysis section seeks to develop a theoretical frame, in which to generate a conversation between critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Gloria Anzaldúa on their view on epistemological oppression and liberation. The result is the development of an analytical concept called dialectics of the borders that exposes epistemological oppression as understood through the critical terms of oppression of objectivism and the suppressed gap. As an answer to the dialectics of border the analysis section develops the phrase dialectics of the gap, as an expression of epistemological liberation, which relies on such concepts as the shape of the gap, epistemological deconstruction, the hybrid entity, and transformative hybridity. The discussion section applies this theoretical frame to various christological concepts in order to create a new useful conceptual model. The constructed conceptual model is called incarnational epistemology and expresses an empowering critical epistemological reconstruction in Christ. The cross is understood as the explicit border between God and humanity, which is expressed by man's colonialization of dialectics. In Christ God transcends these epistemological borders and embodies the gap, as an expression for dialectics of the gap. For example it is demonstrated with the understanding of the body of Christ as the hybridization between subjectivity and objectivity and the sanctification as a reversed incarnation by the collective reconstruction of Christ in the border between subjectivity and objectivity. Hence, humanity as the body of Christ through sanctification can be understood as the mirrored image of Christ incarnating this epistemological reconstruction.