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18 August 2026
With the luxury of foresight (where I can imagine anything, since nothing has happened), I see a potential for "men's MSL" and "women's MSL". I wouldn't use these terms, since I don't want to be the one to institute a gendered expression of MSL, but they are inherited from Leila Ahmed's "men's Islam" and "women's Islam" (from her memoir A Border Passage). For her, "women's Islam" comes about because women did not go to the main mosque meetings, didn't hear the sermons, and generally didn't study the various official Islamic texts. Some, but not all, men did. So while the men focused on what the texts said, the women focused on what they remembered of the Quran, discussing it with each other as they tried to understand their lives, dealing with the problems that their various relationships presented to them. This Islam "stresses moral conduct and emphasizes Islam as a broad ethos and ethical code and as a way of understanding and reflecting on the meaning of one's life and of human life more generally." (p. 125 of the paperback edition from 2000, in ch. 5)
My interpretation: "men's religion" is about law, structure, doctrine, and apologetics. "What is the content of texts?", defending texts, proving which text is correct. Defending the flag, the beliefs, the culture, from those who might deceitfully or violently oppose them. Whereas, in my interpretation, "women's religion" takes some kind of text as given (in Ahmed's world, the remembered Quran, but perhaps similarly in Christian contexts the remembered Bible) and then tries to live according to it, its practitioners adjusting their understanding of the text as necessary because of what it takes to live it in the particulars of life.
I think that my writing up until now has often emphasized "men's MSL", certainly that's broadly what Formulalessness and the MSL and VMH booklets are all about. But resonance with something like "women's MSL" I think is more common among people. It occurs to me that perhaps better, less-gendered names for the two are "epistemic MSL" (what do we believe? what should we believe? let's believe it) and "ethical MSL" (what is the right thing to do? how should we do it? let's do it). Some minds are given to abstraction and learning, while others are given to action. I have been hesitant to be the one to write "how-tos" for MSL, largely because deep understanding (of MSL beliefs and the way the world works) should enable anyone to act in as MSLian a way as they could. To follow a how-to without understanding doesn't work in the long run, as how-tos become obsolete and to correct them requires your own contact with reality, and how-tos that are adequate for someone with the wisdom to interpret them correctly may not be adequate for those who have not built up their understanding, but who may naively try to work them as formulas anyway.
"Women's Islam" sounds like it involves a social, conversational form of building understanding. I can imagine someday MSLians meeting together, when they meet for mutual support, talking over their lives, the people groups they're embedded in, how things are going in their lives as missionaries and in the lives of those they find themselves sent to. What is the right thing to do? What is the MSLian thing to do? What is the MSLian worldview? Holistic tendencies in me want the "men's religion" to be integrated with the "women's religion". "Worldview" is a "men's" term, yet worldview is at least implicit in "women's" reasoning.
"Women's religion" can be very textual, in one sense. A book club involves talking over life stories -- fictional, in the case of a novel. I see a parallel between reading fiction or memoir and discussing it in a group and the discussions between the female family members of Ahmed, where they discuss the problems in the lives of their family members and servants. Book club members sometimes engage in moral analysis, and could easily try to imagine themselves in situations like those of the protagonists of the books they read. Perhaps the literary world is a textual equivalent or expression of "women's religion" (or "ethical religion"), while philosophical, theological, and political texts relate to "men's religion" (or "epistemic religion").
(Literary criticism could be on either side of the "women's/men's" divide, sometimes about the text, and sometimes about life.)
Reading texts of narratives, particularly realistic, contemporary ones (although not necessarily exclusively those), and discussing them, as though they are real situations that MSLians must enter into, could be a "ethical religious" MSLian practice.
MSL so far is mostly locked up in philosophy. Many people can't or don't want to digest philosophy. (I can sympathize.) But narrative (even containing philosophy, if properly digested), is easier for people to take in. The Bible is much more successful than the Summa Theologiae. The Summa is considered a nice addition to the Bible, but the Bible is necessary and prior. But with MSL, the opposite is the case. The philosophy comes first -- so what is there for narrative? I've considered reading MSL into the Bible, and maybe someday I will. But it may be just as appropriate to develop the narrative side of MSL using contemporary texts.
I feel that my MSLian literary analysis project, as much as I've done so far, is turning out to be a kind of monologue version of an MSLian book club, an "ethical MSL" project. I wouldn't want it to be a replacement for such a thing (not a replacement for various MSLians talking over narratives themselves), nor am I totally at ease thinking about how it might end up being a bit too much of a "how to" in some sense. But I may need to keep writing so that I have material that might interest readers, and I guess I will have to live with the fact that I'm at least somewhat treading into "how to" territory.
I suppose all kinds of ethical and practical things could be written by MSLians, and generally speaking, I wouldn't object to them being written. But if I write something related to MSL, it's likely to be seen as being more official than what someone else writes in that space. Perhaps it's self-evident that, for a religion based in reason, things that (truly) follow from first principles are more solid (and thus naturally official) than things that involve guesswork, personal experience, and so on, which others might more validly question from their own, different perspectives. Literary analysis involves seeing things in a human way, not in the alien way of philosophy, to see with your self, and to guess what it's like to be someone else (someone you have never been). I could at least put a disclaimer on my literary analysis project saying that what I'm writing there is not meant to be official, the less it is rooted in some kind of more or less rigorous philosophy.
Is it then the case that an epistemic (or "men's") religion is superior to an ethical (or "women's") one, since philosophy is more official than narrative writing? One could say that the epistemic should be deferred to in epistemic matters, and the ethical in ethical matters. But even the ethical has something to say to epistemic questions, since knowledge of the particular, practical, embodied, etc. is knowledge. (I think it's obvious that the epistemic should inform the ethical in what the ethical does.) Philosophy has its strong points (talking about universals) and its weak points (talking about particulars, talking about human life). I don't know how to prove the existence of God using narrative, something which I think philosophy is capable of. On the other hand, knowing what it's like to be God requires a more narrative type of thinking. Generally, philosophy is good at providing some kinds of information, while narrative is good at providing other kinds. Life without narrative is a "mistake", but so is life without philosophy.
(The guesswork and personal perspective of ethical religious thinking is part of what's good about it. You are the one who guesses, and your perspective is called into question as you use it to make sense of other people and their situations. It changes you in a way that sometimes (often?) philosophical knowledge doesn't change those who possess or obtain it.)