The annual "Holiday Season" is drawing to a close.
Traditionally, it's a time for people of faith to participate in one of their religion's major celebrations.
Traditionally, it's also a time for everyone — regardless of whether they have religious beliefs — to reflect upon the year that has just ended and to prepare for the year ahead.
How do you mark this annual passage?
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globeandmail.com has invited our semi-regular panel from several major faith-based communities and a representative of the atheist/humanist/free thinker groups to address that question.
As usual, the panelists are each writing a short essay, which we are publishing as we receive them. They will also take questions from our readers today.
Join the Conversation or submit a question or comment.
The essays, questions and answers are being published at the bottom of this page, as noted above.
The faith panelists will be addressing the question:
"What does your faith/creed say about Christmas, Hanukkah, Eid and what does the celebration mean to you personally? How does the observation and reflection help you prepare for the year ahead?"
The free thinker on the panel will tackle the same subject — end-of-year contemplation and preparation for the next — without the religious component.
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.
Jennifer A. Harris is an Anglican Christian. She is assistant professor of Christianity and Culture at the University of Toronto.
Her teaching interests include Christianity and contemporary popular culture, sacred space, and the Bible in medieval society.
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.
Editor's Note: globeandmail.com editors will read and allow or reject each question/comment. Comments/questions may be edited for length or clarity. HTML is not allowed. We will not publish questions/comments that include personal attacks on participants in these discussions, that make false or unsubstantiated allegations, that purport to quote people or reports where the purported quote or fact cannot be easily verified, or questions/comments that include vulgar language or libellous statements. Preference will be given to readers who submit questions/comments using their full name and home town, rather than a pseudonym.
Michael Higgins: Christmas — the Nativity of Jesus Christ — is a signal feast, not because it evokes the warm memories associated with family gatherings, ample food and drink (modestly consumed, of course), measured revelry, carol-saturation, bustling crowds in the cathedrals of consumerism, buckets of snow (in New Brunswick this takes on added significance), and all the bric-a-brac of the holiday season, although these are all legitimate components of the festivity, but because the Incarnation, the enfleshment of divinity, is a radical and irreversible rupture of the smooth and settled garment that is time.
For the Roman Catholic believer, the birth of Jesus is the introduction of a "new time," a new dispensation, a new ordering. Things are no longer the same. And what is true for humanity in the collective is true for me as an individual.
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