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Professionalism, and the service industry it begets, can only go so far; we need community and charity to bridge the gap, as they have throughout human history.

"One by one, service providers make excellent arguments for their active presence in our lives.... [W]e ourselves are active participants in this system—many of us make our livings by delivering specialized goods and services within carefully defined professional contexts. Even if we wanted to substitute our own bumbling and amateurish versions of assistance to those for whom we care, we simply don’t have enough time or energy to do it. All of this is possibly true. But don’t we pay a price for it, all the same? When we divide and subdivide ourselves and the persons in our care into countless small, professionally digestible, efficiently deliverable dosages of service, aren’t we in danger of losing sight of the 'whole person?' The difficulty is that each of us is somehow more than the sum of our serviceable parts, for which a steady stream of identical, assembly-line responses might be adequate. To flirt with banality, each of us is a whole person in a unique way." -- William Schambra, the Nonprofit Quarterly


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