Tolkien’s Allegory: Using Peter Jackson’s Vision of Fellowship to Illuminate Male Adolescent Catholic Education

With many of the Catholic student population disengaged from regular ritual experiences their working vocabulary of the prayers and knowledge of the Church is limited. A beneficial bridge for many of these disconnected students, specifically male adolescents has been the use of storytelling in connection to Catholic themes to lay the foundations of ritual and deeper concepts through a more familiar setting. Through media literary, multi-modal instruction and Scripture exegesis adolescents can begin to recognize, understand, and feel a connection with the severity of the sacrifice of the Apostles in following Jesus of Nazareth. This article will offer some insights that have proven to be beneficial to help male adolescents to engage the complicated and foreign concepts and topics of the new curriculum framework, in association with Peter Jackson’s vision of Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring.