{"id":2231,"date":"2005-09-20T00:21:35","date_gmt":"2005-09-20T00:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/with-one-finger.html"},"modified":"2005-09-20T00:21:35","modified_gmt":"2005-09-20T00:21:35","slug":"with-one-finger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/with-one-finger.html","title":{"rendered":"With one finger"},"content":{"rendered":"

At The Spectator, Shawn Macomber on a remarkable young man:<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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With the calloused end of a single finger, Miles Forma is putting the vast majority of the rest of us to shame. <\/p>\n

Wheelchair-bound, robbed of his speech and most other movement by cerebral palsy, the 17-year-old Forma could be understandably focused — fixated, even — on the trials and tribulations in his own life. Instead, this disabled teenager has opted to take on a more global perspective and some of the world’s problems to boot. <\/p>\n

To wit: After seeing Hotel Rwanda<\/em><\/a> on his winter break earlier this year, Forma didn’t simply "tsk-tsk" about the tragedy of it all. "It made me sad and angry that no one was helping the people of Rwanda, so I decided to do something about it," Forma explained via a computerized voice emulator called Dynavox, the same technology that allowed him to chant<\/a> Hebrew passages at his bar mitzvah a couple years back. Though these amplified words had the unmistakably inhuman texture of any modern corporate call center, they were nevertheless laden with sincere emotion. <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At The Spectator, Shawn Macomber on a remarkable young man: With the calloused end of a single finger, Miles Forma is putting the vast majority of the rest of us to shame. Wheelchair-bound, robbed of his speech and most other movement by cerebral palsy, the 17-year-old Forma could be understandably focused — fixated, even —…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWith one finger - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/with-one-finger.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"With one finger - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"At The Spectator, Shawn Macomber on a remarkable young man: With the calloused end of a single finger, Miles Forma is putting the vast majority of the rest of us to shame. Wheelchair-bound, robbed of his speech and most other movement by cerebral palsy, the 17-year-old Forma could be understandably focused — fixated, even —…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/with-one-finger.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2005-09-20T00:21:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"With one finger - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/with-one-finger.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"With one finger - Via Media","og_description":"At The Spectator, Shawn Macomber on a remarkable young man: With the calloused end of a single finger, Miles Forma is putting the vast majority of the rest of us to shame. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2231\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}