The Evolution of the Website and YouTube Channel: To Love So Well the World
By +Brian Ernest Brown, CWC
When I first began To Love So Well the World, both the website and later the YouTube channel, I wasn’t trying to build a brand. I wasn’t trying to craft a platform. I was simply trying to make a small corner of space, a quiet place to write, to wonder, to share, to pray, and to explore the strange new digital humanities of our time and my place, our place, within them.
That was the intention. And in the beginning, it stayed small.
Looking back now, I can see that this website was always about more than content. It was about wholeness. It was about trying to live, and write, with integrity in a world that trains us to fragment ourselves.
Most people in the United States, and probably elsewhere, have lived compartmentalized lives for a long time. We carried one identity to work, another to church, another to family gatherings, another to the ballot box, and, eventually, several more online. The internet didn’t invent that fragmentation, but it certainly accelerated it. It gave us endless chances to manage perception, curate versions of ourselves, and keep our lives divided into neat little rooms.
For years, my online life followed that same pattern.
I ran this blog or that blog, this website or that website, a social media page devoted to one project and another page devoted to something else. Each platform offered a glimpse, a slice, a compartment, a particular identity I was trying to develop or emphasize. And over time I realized what they all had in common: they rarely showed the whole of me. They showed angles, not the person. They showed interests, not the unified thread beneath them.
That growing awareness sharpened when I became interested in #VanLife.
At the time, I imagined a van that would carry me into a new kind of freedom, on the road for art and craft shows, visiting church members, spending time with friends, living lighter and closer to the horizon. I even started a blog devoted to that one facet of life, centered around the van I affectionately named the Kraken. I called it Let Loose the Kraken.
But I struggled to write for it.
It wasn’t that I lacked material. It was that I could feel myself building yet another compartment, another narrow brand, another slice of identity, another little room I would eventually outgrow. I began to see that once the build-out was complete, once the trips were taken, once the breakdowns, and “knock on the window” moments came and went… I would be left with the same question: what then?
Somewhere in that wrestling, I began to think more seriously about “one identity”, not the identity I wanted to project, not the polished persona one might curate online, but the identity that was already there, running through everything like a hidden river.
Around that time I encountered a quote from Mark Zuckerberg in David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect: “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Whether or not one agrees with Zuckerberg’s worldview, that line unsettled me in a useful way. It pressed on a nerve. It raised a question worth asking.
So I asked it.
What was the common thread that ran through my life? What was the deep center? What could hold art and prayer, travel and theology, joy and grief, craft and community, politics and poetry, not as disconnected compartments, but as one unfolding story?
I spent a great deal of time thinking about it, dreaming about it, and praying about it. And I kept returning, again and again, to a poem I had loved for years: “Masts at Dawn” by Robert Penn Warren. At the end, he wrote the line that named something in me I had not yet fully articulated:
“We must try to love so well the world
that we may believe, in the end, in God.”
Looking back, that was the turning point.
That sentence became the compass. It didn’t feel like a slogan. It felt like vocation. It described the long practice of my life: learning to love the world, fiercely, faithfully, attentively, so that love itself might become a road toward God.
Once I saw that thread clearly, everything else began to realign.
I returned to the quiet little blog I had started years earlier, To Love So Well the World, and I began to dust it off. I reworked its theme. I imported content from Let Loose the Kraken and closed that narrower project down. Instead of building more separate rooms, I began gathering the pieces home. I began letting the tributaries flow into one river.
That is how this space evolved.
It never became “everything,” and it never could. No website can contain a whole human life. But over time it began to carry something truer: a more unified voice, a fuller presence, fewer compartments, fewer masks.
And eventually, the final step became obvious.
To Love So Well the World was never meant to be merely a title. It had always been the thread beneath the story. But as the website matured, I realized the truest expression of that thread did not require another brand at all.
It required something simpler.
It required my own name.
And so, in time, this project evolved into what it had been reaching toward all along:
+Brian Ernest Brown
One life. One voice. One pilgrimage. One identity, still seeking, still creating, still learning to love so well the world that we may believe, in the end, in God.