Wealth effects

Q&A | Roberta Green Ahmanson on poverty, affluence, faith, art, and journalism | Marvin Olasky

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(Second in a series focused on people who have already had dynamic careers and are still passionate about their work.)

Roberta Green Ahmanson, 59, is a graduate of Calvin College and an editor of the new book Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion (see WORLD, Feb. 14). A quarter century ago, when we met, she was one of the rare American journalists with a Reformed evangelical worldview. She became a philanthropist when she married Howard Ahmanson in 1986 and joined him in supporting a variety of Christian and secular charities and causes. They have one son.

Q: Did you grow up in affluence?

I grew up working class, to use Marxist terms. My father had dirt under his fingernails. He was a railroad engineer, his father was a railroad brakeman, and most of the other men in my family worked for the railroad. Perry, Iowa, is a town that was one of the original magic towns—they grew up overnight, like magic—when the railroad went across America. Now, the railroad is gone and the main employer is a meat packer. As my husband likes to say, it had a population of 7,000 in 1900 and a population of 7,000 in 2000.