Buenos Días Asclepius: A commentary on Nichole Flores’ Hermeneutic of Justice Applied to Healthcare
Charles Love, Saint Louis University

Institutions created to liberate can become instruments of exclusion and marginalization when severed from their spiritual foundations. When power is negotiated solely within heteronomous or autonomous frameworks—absent the grounding of theonomic virtues—it tends toward domination rather than justice. This paper examines the parallel dynamics between liberal democracy and modern medicine, exploring how both systems utilize desacralized power to marginalize vulnerable populations while claiming moral neutrality. Nichole Flores employs an aesthetic of solidarity to argue that spiritual symbols can reclaim moral space within exclusionary institutions. Her compelling use of Our Lady of Guadalupe (OLG) as a hermeneutic for solidarity recalls the essential theological commitment to human dignity embedded in Christian moral thought. OLG mediates the structural gap between the oppressed and the powerful, offering a vision of radical equality that challenges sociopolitical frameworks that resist engagement on equal terms. Modern medicine, too, has emerged as a system that rejects engagement on equal terms. It erects barriers—epistemic, institutional, and relational—that keep patients on the margins of medical authority and decision-making. Drawing from Michel Foucault and Jeffrey Bishop, who argue that the commodification of medicine, masked by a misplaced emphasis on autonomy, transforms healthcare into an industry of control. The Staff of Asclepius (AS)—once a sacred symbol of healing and solidarity—has become desacralized. This paper argues that Flores’ hermeneutic of solidarity through the agency of OLG, considered within a broader understanding of social power dynamics, can reestablish AS as a symbol of medicine’s commitment to a restorative vision of universal hope by bridging the gap between vulnerable patients and institutionalized medicine, leading to a new ethic of care.