they find joy in the light they bring others, and they know why they have been put on this earth. “This is not a job I’ll retire from,” says Sharon Murphy, who runs Mary House, a refugee-housing organization in Washington. “I love what I do. This kind of work is a way of being.” They can seem very altruistic. But it’s worth remembering, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, that the concept of altruism was invented only in the eighteenth century. Once people decided that human nature is essentially egoist and selfish, then it was necessary to invent a word for when people weren’t driven by
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