The Halton (Ontario) Catholic District School Board made headlines recently with its decision to pull Philip Pullman's children's novel The Golden Compass from library shelves at its schools.
The board plans a "review" of the books after receiving a complaint that the author is an avowed atheist.
The decision gave rise to the usual lament of censorship, and a heated debate about what children are taught in schools — only days before a major movie starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig is set to make its debut.
What do you think?
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globeandmail.com has invited a panel to debate the issues raised by the book, movie and the school board's decision.
The panelists have all written a short essay addressing these questions:
"What does your religion/faith/creed say about how and when children get their first religious instruction?
"What does your religion/faith/creed teach about other faiths or about people who do not believe in God?
"When should children be allowed to make their own independent decisions about what to believe?"
The essays and the questions and answers appear at the bottom of this page.
The members of our panel are:
Michael W. Higgins is President of St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B., and Past President of St. Jerome's University in the University of Waterloo.
Dr. Higgins is a broadcaster, author and co-author of numerous books and CBC Ideas series, including Heretic Blood, The Muted Voice, Power and Peril and Stalking the Holy.
Lorna Dueck, an Evangelical Christian journalist, writes a monthly column for The Globe and Mail.
She also hosts Listen Up TV, a weekly newsmagazine on spiritual perspectives in current events, seen Sundays on Global TV, and Thursdays on CTS, Salt and Light TV and Christian Channel.
Rabbi Ed Elkin has been the spiritual leader of the First Narayever Congregation in downtown Toronto since 2000.
Born in New York, he graduated from Princeton University and has worked or studied in Canada, the U.S. and Israel.
Sheema Khan also writes a monthly column for The Globe. She has a Masters degree in physics and a Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard. She has worked in R&D, is an inventor and has worked at law firms in intellectual property law.
Ms. Khan also served as chair of the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) from 2000-2005.
Justin Trottier is executive director of the Centre for Inquiry
Ontario, making him the first full-time paid staff member at the first venue dedicated to humanists and freethinkers in Canada.
He is co-founder of the political advocacy group Canadian Secular Alliance, as well as president of the multimedia outreach group Freethought Association of Canada.
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Dr. Michael Higgins: The Roman Catholic tradition values the power of the word and sometimes fears it.
The ambivalence felt within the tradition — treasuring the rich possibilities inherent in the unfettered imagination and yet at the same time recognizing the need to secure the boundaries of orthodoxy — are perfectly captured in the decision made by the Halton District Catholic School Board, a decision that I consider generated more by fear than enlightened solicitude.
Passing on or transmitting the "faith" is a critical part of being a community of faith.
Catholicism understands the deeply familial/tribal dimension of faith and eschews the post-modern obsession with marginality.
To be religious, to "have" faith, implies growth, maturity, discernment.
It means to be in a relationship with Christ that is personal and affective, yet grounded in a larger narrative than the individual, a narrative that is historical, symbolic, organic and transcendent. In short, bigger than oneself.
To that end, precisely because faith is not a private project, Catholicism attaches considerable importance to imparting the tradition to the young, not because it is a form of enslavement, nor because it demands childlike deference, nor because it delimits the freedom of the child, but because it provides a life-giving context, vocabulary, and frame of reference for meaning-infused values and convictions.
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