October 10

Ken Saro-Wiwa,, Vida Dutton Scudder, Tom Murton, and the World Days against the Death Penalty and for Mental Health

Author

David Barnhart
October 10, 2025

Goldenrod and Bee, 2025. Own photo.

Today marks the birth of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian writer, environmental activist, and martyr who stood up to the corrupt and murderous alliance between his government and oil giant Dutch Royal Shell. 

Today is also a feast day, in the Episcopal Church, for Vida Dutton Scudder, who died in 1954. She was a professor and lesbian Christian socialist activist, who agitated for worker’s rights and world peace.  She was also one of the leader members in the settlement house movement, in which college students, organized by women, would live in intentional community and serve local poor neighborhoods.

Today marks the death, in 1990, of Tom Murton, a prison warden who advocated prison reform and, when he blew the lid off of corruption, extortion, murder and abuse in the Arkansas forced labor system, was fired and blacklisted from correctional work. He was also an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. 

Fittingly, it is also the World Day Against the Death Penalty, as well as World Mental Health Day. 

Reflection: 

Vida Dutton Scudder wrote: 

“The worst danger of the mystic is as always a quest of spiritual privilege leading to aloofness from the common lot.”

Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote: 

“The writer cannot be a mere storyteller; he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely x-ray society’s weaknesses, its ills, its perils. He or she must be actively involved in shaping its present and its future.”

and

“In this country [England], writers write to entertain, they raise questions of individual existence...but for a Nigerian writer in my position you can't go into that. Literature has to be combative. You cannot have art for art's sake. This art must do something to transform the lives of a community, of a nation. And for that reason, literature has a different purpose altogether in that sort of society...The stories that I tell must have a different sort of purpose from the artist in the Western world...and art, in that instance, becomes so meaningful both to the artist and to the consumers of that art, because you do not just depend on them to read your books, you even have to live a life that they can emulate.”

Prayer: Word of God, the petty tyrants of this world are terrified of the word and the truth. Give your people the power to speak truth. Amen.