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The Very Reverend James Parks Morton, founder and president of The Interfaith Center of New York
(1997), was for 25 years Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where he was
instrumental in transforming the very heart of urban social and cultural life in New York
City and brought the environment and interfaith movements into the center of religious
dialogue and action.
Even a partial list of his accomplishments is astonishing in its breadth and depth:
he helped found the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB) dedicated to helping
people rebuild, occupy and own their own apartments; the youth self-help organization,
The Valley, which annually assists over 5000 inner-city youth; Homes for the Homeless,
a program serving the poorest families in the community by helping them to find housing
and to attain the life-skills needed to maintain their homes; the Stoneyard Apprentice
Program which trained local unemployed youth to become skilled stonecarvers and stone
masons. He opened the Cathedral to the arts through artist-in-residence programs, free
concerts of great music, art exhibitions and apprentice programs. His environmental
initiatives included the first Recycling Center on ManhattanÕs Upper West Side; the
creation of annual New York institutions St. Francis Day and The Native American Thanksgiving,
and the founding of the Joint Appeal of Science and Religion and the National Religious
Partnership for the Environment, a group which has instilled over 50,000 congregations of
every faith across America with the idea of sacred ecology and environmental responsibility.
A visionary and innovator, he continues to broaden the scope of interfaith work and the upholding
of all great spiritual traditions -- to enhance and integrate the lives of each individual while
maintaining the diversity of community; to preserve the integrity of the environment, and to
deepen the quality of every life - through the wise and tolerant use of the strengths of all
religious and faith traditions. Interfaith Center programs are focused on the International and
United Nations, Urban Clergy, and Culture and the Arts.
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