End-of-Life Care and Horror Scholarship: A Praxis Podcast featuring Kristen Maples, MDiv '24

MADDISON TENNEY: So, Kristen, tell us about your degree and what your focus is. 

KRISTEN MAPLES: So I just graduated with a Masters of Divinity from the Harvard Divinity School. I came to the Divinity School interested in studying chaplaincy. I have a special interest in end of life care as well as elder care, specifically dementia. So I actually fell into religious studies by accident. 

It's a really long story, but my parents raised us outside of religion, wanting us to find our own path instead of raising us in one, and I never quite found one that fit. And then when I was in undergrad, I had to take a world religions class just as part of the Gen Ed requirements. And I just loved it, and I was obsessed with it. 

It was my first exposure to religion outside of the few visits I did when I was a teenager to different churches. So I added it as a minor. I was doing a biology major. And then once I finished my minor, I just wanted more. So I ended up double majoring in biology and religious studies. 

And then while I was in undergrad, I was working in a hospital here in Oshkosh in the emergency room. And that experience of witnessing people go through these really traumatic events, these miracles, all these different situations really just profoundly affected me. And I think that is what led me into chaplaincy and what interested me in end of life care, of seeing people come in with their family at end of life, people that are very sick. 

And I observed that the people that are sick have their own spiritual needs, but the people around them also have their own spiritual experiences that they're going through. And that is really what interested me in chaplaincy in the first place. 

MADDISON TENNEY: What made you decide on that program and that focus? 

KRISTEN MAPLES: Well, interestingly, HDS is actually the only school I applied to, so I put all my eggs in one basket, and that was for a number of reasons. I did a lot of research. As a non-religious person, it was important to me to find a curriculum that was not focused on a specific sect of Christianity, and a lot of divinity schools are affiliated with a specific church. 

And also, as an LGBTQ person, it was also important to me to find a place that would be safe for me. The other reason was when I went to the admitted student-- not the admitted student's day, the prospective student's day and the different events that they had on zoom, because this was just after the shutdown, it was the only school that talked about intentionally selecting a diverse cohort. So this idea that you don't just learn with each other but from each other. 

And I've been living in mostly white middle class environments my whole life. And I like the idea of going to class with people that are different from me, so I could get some of these experiences. 

MADDISON TENNEY: I feel like I also came to HDS for a similar reason of wanting to have both a diverse curriculum and a diverse student body to really learn from. I'd love to return to something you said, if that's OK. You talked about being a queer person and that being impacting of where you want it to go to school and what you wanted to study. I just was curious how your time was in Cambridge and at Harvard Divinity School as a person of the LGBTQ plus community. 

KRISTEN MAPLES: It was great. I could be out and open, and it was just a wonderful experience. HDS has a really vibrant queer community and Boston as well. There are all kinds of Facebook groups and different events around town you could go to all the time. I thought it was wonderful. 

MADDISON TENNEY: So you're here. You studied end of life care. And what are you doing now post graduate work? What does that look like for you? 

KRISTEN MAPLES: So right now, I have two months off, and I have a residency, a one year residency starting. I'll be at a hospital in the Midwest for that. Even though I'm interested in end of life care and elder care, I decided not to do a specialty CPE residency, because I don't have a lot of experience, for example, working with children. And I feel like it would be a disservice to my future patients to only know how to work with them. 

I also need to be able to talk with their family members, their friends. So I thought the best thing I could do for my future patients is to have that diverse education. So I've got two months off where I'm just—right now, I'm in my childhood bedroom. I'm living with my parents for the summer and spending time with my friends here. And it's been really lovely. 

Just I've never had time off. I've been working since I was 14. So I'm taking this time to just read books and do hobbies and spend time with my parents. They're getting older now and seeing my friends here. And then I have that one year residency, and then I hope to work as a chaplain after that. 

MADDISON TENNEY: So I had the opportunity to be on a panel with Kristen at our time at HDS and it was so interesting. I loved being able to learn about what you were studying here at HDS, and I would just love if you could talk more or talk about your focus on horror movies as a sacred practice and creating your field of study at HDS. 

KRISTEN MAPLES: Yeah. Thank you. So I wrote my thesis on horror movies or watching horror movies as a sacred practice. And just like coming to HDS, it was a long, strange story of how I ended up doing that. So I've always loved horror movies. It's always been a big part of my life. 

And I wrote on my thesis, so I think it was two winters ago, my brother forced me to watch Black Christmas, which is a slasher movie. And I had no interest in slasher movies, because I don't really like violence. And I find I don't really see the purpose of or the value of a movie whose center narrative is just a man going around murdering women. It seems really frivolous and silly to me, but I received it as a feminist text. And then that question of like, how is something that's built around misogyny, how could that be feminist? I thought that was so interesting. 

So I started reading about horror, and then I started making this connection of how I could maybe build it into my studies at HDS. So I was taking at the time a class on witch hunts with Dr. Gaston Helen. 

I asked her if I could write a paper on how horror movies have influenced and provided social commentary and moral panics over time. And then I was also taking that semester or it might have been the next semester now. The timeline is a bit loose in my head. I was taking a class on birds and religion with Dr. Kimberly Patton, with Dr. Patton. And I had noticed this phenomenon of how birds appear early in horror movies as like a harbinger of horror. 

So I wrote a paper on that as well, and I'd never been so intellectually stimulated by coursework before. And I discovered I had this intellectual interest in horror. And I started thinking, how can I make my thesis around this? Because I just want to keep—I just want to keep reading about horror and studying horror, because the scholarship is fascinating. 

And you can trace-- I think I mentioned this in my presentation, where you can trace how the monsters at the center of horror movies change in response to what's happening in society. So as we enter different wars or we transition between republican and democrat or democrat and republican presidencies, we see these changes in how monsters are represented. And they react to modern societal fears and really profound in interesting ways. 

And I've been listening to the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast for a long time. I think you're familiar with that. And that's where I got the idea of incorporating secular texts into a sacred practice. So that podcast is centered around reading as a sacred practice. 

So this is something that I think is a really good model for this kind of rising. We talk about this a lot in divinity school, the rise of the religious nones, which are people that have no religious affiliation, such as myself. 

And I feel like this is a way to experience religion when you're not religious, if that makes sense. That word, I think we need a new word that maybe someone will come up with it in divinity school in a couple years or something. So I took that model of reading as a sacred practice and applied it to horror films, the media film to see what would happen. 

So I watched the same couple of films over and over again with different people and talked about it with them afterwards to see what they saw in those movies. And it was really fascinating how there's so much that you can gain from these movies that you need other people to help with that process. 

I learned so much about myself, so much about humanity. I made new friends. It was really just a really profound experience. And if I went back to school, I'd probably get a PhD in horror scholarship, but that's probably a long way down the road if I do that. 

MADDISON TENNEY: I am very interested in your connection between studying horror and doing chaplaincy. As an outside observer, to me, those feel very connected of this act of witnessing and grief and trauma and our role as both participants and observers. 

And I was wondering if you could just talk about if you feel that intersection or maybe a skill set that has benefited you in both spaces that you've learned over time? 

KRISTEN MAPLES: Yeah, I do. I do see a connection. And I think, I've been talking with Greg Epstein, he's one of the chaplains at Harvard, about how I can incorporate my horror work going forward. And I don't think it would be appropriate to use it in a hospital setting but doing some sort of outside work. I also have a degree in library science. I don't know if we ever talked about that, but there's this really interesting intersection section between library science and divinity school that I never would have seen. 

There's something that you talk about in library school called the reference interview. So that's when if someone comes up to the desk and they have a question, what they ask you is almost never what it is that they actually need. So you need to have the skill of being able to figure out what it is that they actually need and help them get there in a way that's not handholding, in a way that's not—what's the word—patronizing. 

I think that's what chaplaincy is really. It's helping people figure out what it is that they're looking for but using their own mind, not telling them what it is they need to believe. So there's a lot of overlap there. And what I would love to do is to work with a library nearby where I'm as chaplain and do evening programming, weekend programming for adults. 

And I need to figure out what that's going to look like. I'm going to probably have to work with the library and do some research and talk to some people. I don't know what it's going to be, but I think it's definitely going to happen. I just need to figure that out. And that's hard and scary, but it'll be fun, I think, too. 

MADDISON TENNEY: I'm immediately fascinated. I had no idea you did another degree before coming to HDS. I would love to hear more about that. So you did your undergrad in biology and religion, double major, and then you did a library degree. 

KRISTEN MAPLES: So I was actually a returning adult student undergrad. So I graduated, I think, when I turned 28 or 29 or something like that. And then I took a year off because I had thought about being a physician. And I worked as an assistant to some OBGYN physicians for a year and was like, no, this is not the life for me. 

And the reason I didn't go into chaplaincy right away was because I had this—it's a very common misconception, or I guess the field is changing now where it used to be a solely Christian endeavor. So I didn't think that being a chaplain was possible for me as a non-religious person. I didn't even look into it. 

And I thought librarianship would be a good backup helping profession, because you do still get to have that interaction and support people that need you out in the community. And then when I was halfway through my library degree, someone introduced me to The Harry Potter and The Sacred Text Podcast. And one of the co-hosts of that show identified as an atheist chaplain. And I was like, say what? 

So then I decided to—I applied to Divinity School immediately after I graduated from—or at least when the next round of interviews was open after I finished library school. And just I never even worked as a librarian. I just came right to Divinity School because I knew that's what I wanted to do. 

MADDISON TENNEY: This is fascinating, and I loved what you said earlier about the skills of a librarian transferring to the skills of a chaplain. And I'm so curious, again, are there any other skill sets you've learned in that space that were really helpful at HDS or maybe things you wish you had had in your library sciences degree that you learned at HDS? 

KRISTEN MAPLES: I actually talk about this a lot with people. I wish that some aspects of information science, which is the broader category that library science is under, was part of Gen Ed requirements in high school or college, because it really did impact how I view the world and navigate the world. Because you study how information is organized and how people seek information. And that's really impacted how I safely navigate the internet and use mobile devices. 

And it really makes me a very efficient researcher. So I'm very good at using databases, which is very helpful in graduate school. And it's something that—I remember reading in library school that final year PhD students are vastly under utilizing databases, and they don't even know that they don't know that because no one's ever taught them how to use databases. Because you don't know they don't work the same as an internet research or as a Google, for example. 

So I would recommend anybody listening if you want to go to graduate school to talk to the librarians and learn how to use databases, because there are some little teeny tips and tricks that take a couple of seconds that can make a huge difference in how you find information. 

MADDISON TENNEY: So we've talked a little bit about your journey to HDS, what you've done at HDS, and your residency after HDS. Is chaplaincy a field you see yourself working in for the rest of your life? You mentioned a little bit about PhD program, but where do you hope to go now that you've graduated? 

KRISTEN MAPLES: I want to work in chaplaincy for a long time. If I do a PhD, it probably won't be for a while. And I didn't realize I had this academic interest in horror films until my last year of Divinity School. So I don't know. It's hard to say that if I figured that out sooner, if I might have done that. 

But I don't know if I want to be a professor, and there's not much else you can do with a PhD these days, especially in horror scholarship. So there may be something more I'll do for fun later if I have the resources and the time and the opportunity. But I spent so many years working on chaplaincy, and I do feel that it's the right place for me. 

When I did that one CPE unit in my master's degree, I loved it. And it just felt like this is where I'm supposed to be and these are the people I'm supposed to work with. And then I think I'll find out after I do my residency if I do want to specialize or if I want to be a general hospital chaplain. 

MADDISON TENNEY: Thank you so much, Kristen, for letting me interview for the HDS Praxis Podcast. I'm going to end with a couple of quick response questions. First, what musician or artist are you currently listening to or obsessed with? 

KRISTEN MAPLES: OK. Well, I just returned from England with my mom. We visited Liverpool because we've always wanted to see the Beatles sites. So I would say the Beatles are my band right now. 

MADDISON TENNEY: I love it. Second, in a sentence or less, if you could create any class at HDS, what would you create? 

KRISTEN MAPLES: Oh, I would definitely—there is a gap in either disabilities theology or something about end of life or a class on death, grief, dying. That's really missing at HDS, I think. 

MADDISON TENNEY: And then last but not least, any words of wisdom you would give your younger self who is just starting out at Harvard Divinity School? 

KRISTEN MAPLES: Oh, that's a good question. I think I would probably say, the hardest thing about starting out, moving across town, across the country was making new friends and how hard it was at first and to just say, it'll come, they'll come, they'll find you, and you'll be OK. 

MADDISON TENNEY: Kristen, this has been a lovely experience. Thank you so much for letting me interview you. 

KRISTEN MAPLES: Yeah, this was super fun. 

MADDISON TENNEY: This has been a Harvard Divinity School Podcast. Thank you so much to Caroline Cataldo and Jonathan Beasley for editing this podcast. For more information on the show, you can view the show notes or go to the Harvard Divinity School website.