"To destroy cities, either materially or morally, . . . this is to sever every bond of poetry and love between human beings and the universe. . . ."

"Mais détruire des cités, soit matériellement, soit moralement, . . . c'est couper tout lien de poésie et d'amour entre des âmes humaines et l'univers."

     Simone Weil, "Love of the order of the world," in "Forms of the implicit love of God," in Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London:  Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1951), 115-116, italics mine.  Context:

The love of the beauty of the world, while it is universal, involves, as a love which is secondary and subordinate to itself, the love of all the truly precious things which bad fortune can destroy.  The truly precious things [('the pure and authentic achievements of art and science', 'everything which envelops human life with poetry through all the social strata')] are those which form ladders [(échelles)] reaching towards the beauty of the world, openings [(ouvertures)] on to it.  He who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the world itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before.

French from Œuvres, ed. Florence de Lussy (Paris:  Le Grand Livre du Mois < Éditions Gallimard, 1999), 744.

The times, they are unchanging

robertdarnton.org/bio

Robert "Darnton saw that the Enlightenment, viewed from the ground-level perspective of the S[ociété ]T[ypographique de ]N[euchâtel, 'one of the Enlightenment's most important publishing houses',] looked very different from the version of the subject then popular in universities.  In the works of highly regarded scholars like Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay, the Enlightenment was in its essence a profound revolution of the mind that liberated critical reason from the shackles of religion and rationalist philosophy.  A reader properly began, and sometimes concluded, its study by following Rousseau and Kant, Hume and Montesquieu along the deepest currents of their thought.  But this 'Enlightenment' was to a large extent a retrospective invention that took the works out of the social settings in which they originally circulated.
     "The STN sold 'philosophical books,' but by 'philosophical' it meant something very different from what we mean today.  One of its catalogs indiscriminately included, under this heading, Rousseau's Social Contract, slander-filled attacks against King Louis XV, and explicit pornography.  In another early article, Darnton drew from this fact an eloquent conclusion:  'A regime that classified its most advanced philosophy with its most debased pornography was a regime that sapped itself, that dug its own underground and that encouraged philosophy to degenerate into libelle.'  Whatever the High Enlightenment may have done to slowly undermine the church and state, the works of slander and pornography savagely scraped away at the reputation and legitimacy of the actual men and women who constituted France's ruling elites."

     David A. Bell, "From readers to revolutionaries," The New York review of books 66, no. 11 (June 27, 2019):  66 (66-67).

"I do not think of political power as an end. Neither do I think of economic power as an end. They are ingredients in the objective which we seek in life. And I think that end or that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community."

"When I talk about power and the need for power, I’m talking in terms of the need for power to bring about the political and the economic changes necessary to make the good life a reality.  I do not think of political power as an end.  Neither do I think of economic power as an end.  They are ingredients in the objective which we seek in life. And I think that end or that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community."

     Martin Luther King, Jr., in "The march in Mississippi," a CBS News special report dated 26 June 1966.
     I am posting this for Suzanne Smith, Reference and Instruction Librarian at Multnomah University, who, with the help of Daniel Smith, Research, Instruction, and Digital Services Librarian at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and a special collections librarian at the University of Mississippi, tracked this to source over the listserv ATLANTIS on 7 August 2019.
     The quote often appears with the following minor errors in transcription (as well as an erroneous reference to “Too Many Cooks, Too Much Spice," The Christian century 83, no. 28 (July 13, 1966):  880-881) as:

I do not think of political power as an end. Neither do I think of economic power as an end. They are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think that end of that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community.

Three examples of the errors alluded to immediately above, as supplied by Suzanne:

Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 488 [two omissions and one error, correct source is listed at the end of end note 14]: 

When I talk about power and the need for power, I’m talking in terms of the need for power to bring about the political and economic change necessary to make the good life a reality. I do not think of political power as an end. Neither do I think of economic power as an end. They are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think that end or that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community. 

King Center [wrong source and two errors, as of early August 2019]: 

In a July 13, 1966 article in Christian Century Magazine, Dr. King affirmed the ultimate goal inherent in the quest for the Beloved Community: 'I do not think of political power as an end. Neither do I think of economic power as an end. They are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think that end of that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community' 

Baunoch, ed., Foundation Theology 2006: Faculty Essays for Ministry Professionals, p. 73 [omits “or” between “end” and “that”; also wrongly cites July 13, 1966 Christian Century article as the source in footnote 19]: 

I do not think of political power as an end. Neither do I think of economic power as an end. They are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think that end, that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community.

"The whole idea that Jesus . . . practiced 'radical hospitality' is . . . a modern ecclesial myth."

"The whole idea that Jesus—who had 'nowhere to lay his head' (Luke 9:58)—practiced 'radical hospitality' is, I think, a modern ecclesial myth.  Jesus was radically open to the hospitality of others, but he also placed radical demands on those who wished to follow him."

     Robert MacSwain, "'The gifts of God for the people of God':  some thoughts on Baptism and Eucharist," Sewanee theological review 56, no. 1 (Christmas 2012): 79 (71–84).  Ruth A. Meyers, at "Who May Be Invited to the Table?," Anglican Theological Review 94, no. 2 (Spr 2012): 238 (233–44), cites Andrew McGowan, "The Meals of Jesus and the Meals of the Church:  Eucharistic Origins and Admission to Communion," in Studia liturgica diversa:  essays in
honor of Paul F. Bradshaw, ed. Maxwell E. Johnson and L. Edward Phillips (Portland, OR: Pastoral Press, 2004), 107, 101-115 (which I have not consulted).

"insofar as liberal principles seem to be needed to deal with actual pluralism, these same principles magnify their own necessity over time."

"In fact, however, liberalism tends to see itself and pluralism precisely as such an absolute standard.  As Rawls puts it, pluralism is not simply a de facto problem to which liberalism is the de facto answer; rather pluralism is the product of individual reason working under free, that is to say liberal, institutions.  Indeed, Rawls suggests, increasing pluralism is therefore a social good, producing a variety of viewpoints and encouraging tolerance.  Hence, tolerance is not simply a matter of getting along, a mere modus vivendi, but a normative goal.  But as a normative goal, it also tends to take on the form of an interior disposition that in fact relativizes the good.  In any case, if liberal institutions result in increasingly diverse notions of the good, there would seem to be no principled limit to this process.

     "Given this particularly corrosive version of liberalism, policing the interactions of freedoms becomes a crucial state role."  Etc.

     David S. Crawford, "Gay marriage, public reason, and the common good," Communio:  international Catholic review 41, no. 2 (Summer 2014):  411-412 (380-437), underscoring (and, in the header, italics) mine.

Man loves God not so as to refer God to himself, but rather himself to God

"The part . . . love[s] the good of the whole . . . not . . . so as to refer the good of the whole to itself, but rather itself to the good of the whole."

"bonum totius diligit quidem pars secundum quod est sibi conveniens, non autem ita quod bonum totius ad se referat, sed potius ita quod seipsam refert in bonum totius."

     St. Thomas Aquinas, ST II-II.26.3 ("Whether, out of charity, man is bound to love God more than himself").ad 2, FEDP.  Latin from Corpus Thomisticum.  From ad 3:

That a man wishes to enjoy [(frui)] God pertains to that love of God which is love of concupiscence [(amore concupiscentiae)].  Now we love God with the love of friendship [(amore amicitiae)] more than with the love of concupiscence, because the Divine good is greater in itself, than our share of good in enjoying Him [(quia maius est in se bonum Dei quam participare possumus fruendo ipso)]. Hence, out of charity, man simply loves God more than himself.

Note that this means that the love of friendship (a major theme in Aquinas on the relationship with himself that God desires to effect in us) is the love of charity.

     My own paraphrase of those last two sentences:  The goodness of God is infinitely greater than that "portion" of it that we will ever (even, presumably, in glory) have the capacity to participate in by way of personal fulfillment.  So we must also love God with the love of friendship, i.e. charity, i.e. the Love by which God loves his own infinite goodness.

"a cheap and easy way of being 'critical'"

From Wikipedia

"where once they sought to transmit to each new generation the wisdom of past ages, today most within the universities equate critical thinking with a simpleminded repudiation of the past.  A lodestar of the European spirit has been the rigorous discipline of intellectual honesty and objectivity.  But over the past two generations, this noble ideal has been transformed.  The asceticism that once sought to free the mind of the tyranny of dominant opinion has become an often complacent and unreflective animus against everything that is our own.  This stance of cultural repudiation functions as a cheap and easy way of being 'critical.'  Over the last generation, it has been rehearsed in the lecture halls, becoming a doctrine, a dogma.  And to join in professing this creed is taken to be the mark of 'enlightenment,' and of spiritual election.  As a consequence, our universities are now active agents of ongoing cultural destruction."

     "The Paris statement: a Europe we can believe in" (7 October 2017), no. 21.