April 13

Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Josephine Butler, Rosemary Haughton, and William Alexander

Author

David Barnhart
April 13, 2025

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin, 2022. Own Photo.

Today marks the death, in 1978, of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, an educator and women’s rights activist in Nigeria. She led thousands of women in nonviolent resistance to imperial rule and economic oppression. 

Today is the birthday, in 1828, of Josephine Butler, an activist for women’s suffrage and an advocate for humane treatment of prostitutes and an end to human trafficking. She was outraged that men of society would disparage prostitutes who they visited and would subject them to dehumanizing policies. She was a community organizer who would rally women to challenge lawmakers to meetings in person, and mocked their cowardice when they refused to meet with her. 

Today is also the birthday, in 1927, of Rosemary Haughton, a Roman Catholic author and theologian who proposed thinking of the church as two sisters: the “Mother Church” who represents the institution, which can often be domineering, and “Sophia,” the Wisdom of Christ, who inspires with mysticism.

Today is also the birthday, in 1824, of William Alexander, a poet and bishop of the Church of Ireland. You can read some of his poetry here. 

Reflection: 

The true position of Nigerian women had to be judged from the women who carried babies on their backs and farmed from sunrise to sunset, not women who used tea, sugar, and flour for breakfast.

Josephine Butler described her prayer life this way: 

I spoke to [God] in solitude, as a person who could answer. ... Do not imagine that on these occasions I worked myself up into any excitement; there was much pain in such an effort, and dogged determination required. Nor was it a devotional sentiment that urged me on. It was a desire to know God and my relation to Him.

Rosemary Haughton wrote:

There are not many ways to God, but only one, and it lies through the depth of a man’s own soul, when he leaves his false self behind, and stripped, and alone like the myth heroes–goes into the darkness. The darkness may be a catastrophe, personal or communal, or it may be the yearly, daily round of ordinary living, continued when the first enthusiasm has died and there seems no reason to go on and do right except clinging to a laughable conviction that there is something worth going on for. And in the depth of this darkness is Christ, who passed from the world and the flesh that we know into the complete world and the whole man.

Prayer: Word of God, so much of what we know of you cannot be expressed in words. And what can be expressed and what is most true is often best said in poetry and song, not in sermons. Amen.