My Tower of Babel

My Tower of Babel is a deeply personal narrative about two teenagers attempting to connect across an unbridgeable epistemic divide. The story follows a young man who finds strength in doubt, approaching the world through curiosity and questioning, and a young woman who finds strength in faith, deeply Christian, raised in that tradition, and possessing a brilliant mind. They share deep conversations about profound problems, romantically and intellectually entangled in the intense way that smart teenagers entangle themselves. The narrative tracks his theological exploration through college, driven by genuine curiosity rather than hostility, as he engages with apologetics circles and various faith communities while maintaining deep conversations each month with her about her faith. The story builds toward a final, fateful dialogue that begins with his provocative assertion: “I feel like God's greatest crime against humanity was the destruction of the Tower of Babel and the elimination of a common tongue.”

The thematic core is not simply about religion, it is about how we know, how we believe, how we construct meaning, and what happens when two people operating from irreconcilable systems of understanding attempt to truly see each other. The Tower of Babel becomes a metaphor not for intellectual disagreement but for emotional impossibility: the inability to communicate love across epistemic divides, to transfer feeling through frameworks that cannot receive it. The protagonist's frustration emerges not from intellectual arrogance but from caring too much to stay silent, watching people he loves walk toward what he perceives as harm while being unable to make them see what he sees. The tragedy is symmetrical: she feels the same way, wishing she could make him see what she sees. This is a story about a person who loves someone and cannot communicate that love in a way she can receive, standing on opposite sides of rubble, shouting in languages the other cannot understand.