Law professor pursues theology, restorative justice

Bruce Kittle belongs to a select group of lawyers: those with seminary degrees.

A clinical assistant professor of law, Kittle acknowledges that he knows of only four or five others who have mingled legal and theological training. “It’s not a combination I hear of too often,” he says.

For Kittle, the rare combination reflects a unique personal and spiritual journey – one that has traversed big-time college football, corporate law, ministry and the UW Law School. The pilgrimage, which included a struggle with the role of faith in his life, has now positioned him as a leading voice in the growing field of restorative justice.

Kittle’s life sojourn commenced in Cedar Falls, Iowa, in a non-political and nominally Christian home. After high school, he starred on the University of Iowa football team and served as co-captain of the Hawkeyes’ 1981 Rose Bowl team. The former offensive tackle turned to coaching after graduation and spent four years as an assistant to Iowa head coach Hayden Fry, returning to the Rose Bowl in 1986. But the allure of college coaching – his career goal at the time – faded during that tenure. “I started to see it as less of my life and more of a game,” Kittle recalls.

He quit coaching and enrolled in Iowa’s law school, where he excelled, finishing in the top 10 percent of his class. He then snagged a prestigious clerkship with the Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in St. Paul. Law school forged his ethical and moral values about politics and law, he says, leading to a desire to help people less fortunate. The pressure to land a corporate job won the day, however, and several years of private practice followed in Iowa and Madison.

But a gnawing sense of discomfort with the values of the corporate grind – combined with the death of a close friend, the reading of an influential book and answers to prayer – propelled Kittle to search for a larger purpose in life.

“I had always had a belief in a creator or a divine being, and I really started turning reflective and inward about trying to resolve what was going on, because it seemed to be originating from a deeper place than just what I was doing day to day,” he says. Fueling his search was a gift from a friend: Dietrich Bonhoffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. A German Lutheran theologian, Bonhoffer aggressively resisted Hitler’s regime and was hanged by the Nazis in 1945.

“Through that book, I realized that I was attempting to kind of control all this stuff in my life,” Kittle says. “And this sounds wacky, but I hadn’t quite surrendered enough to the powers that be, at least as I understand that process, and hadn’t really made a commitment to go where I was called to go, regardless of what that may mean personally.”

That call was to enter the ministry. Kittle says he first heard it driving to work in December 1993 and had it confirmed two months later on a business trip to Florida, through a providential meeting with a Catholic bishop from Canada.

Kittle acknowledges that for some people, the concept of a call from God through Jesus – his framework of faith – seems a bit “over the edge.” “It seemed like a foreign notion to me, too,” he adds. “I have a wife, kids, a mortgage. So I thought I had misunderstood the message. And part of it was just a fear of following it.” Fear notwithstanding, Kittle gave his two-month notice at the law firm and enrolled at Chicago Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with the United Church of Christ. Commuting from Madison for four years, he graduated this spring with a master’s in divinity.

That part of his journey not only put 40,000 miles on his 1986 Buick Electra; it also brought him to UW–Madison. While preparing to enter the seminary, Kittle applied for an opening at the Law School’s Frank J. Remington Center, which seeks to improve the criminal justice system. Kittle was hired to work with the Legal Assistance to Institutionalized Persons program. In his spare time, he was told, he could work on another endeavor – the Restorative Justice Project, the entire contents of which were contained in a thin, manila-colored file folder. “I had never heard of restorative justice,” he says. Kittle has proven himself a quick study. He is now the full-time director of the program, and this past spring he was named the restorative justice planner with the state’s Division of Community Corrections. Restorative justice, Kittle explains, views crime as less of a violation of law than a violation of a human being. It seeks to restore the victim, the offender and their community. More than 300 such programs are now operating in the United States and Canada. A key element is victim-offender mediation, also called victim-offender conferencing. These conferences are face-to-face meetings between victims and their offenders mediated by trained counselors. They give victims the opportunity to explain how the crime has affected them and offenders the chance to apologize. Often times, the two work together to devise a plan of restoration, to repair the harm caused by the offense. Kittle has mediated 15 such conferences concerning serious and/or violent crimes since 1994, with half of them during the past 11 months.

“When I talk about restorative justice with people, I tell them you’ve got to put your boots on,” he says. “Because to wade into the community, to ask the questions you need to ask, to get input from people, to meet with them – it takes time. It’s much different than a group of five professionals deciding what will work and implementing it.”

Kittle will not only be able to pursue restorative justice through his position at the Law School, but also in a future role as a minister. In the next six months, he expects to be ordained in a criminal justice ministry position through his denomination.

Through his work at the Law School and his faith journey, Kittle says he senses what he calls a “deep need” in corporate America and academia for people to tap into their spirituality – although as a lawyer, he ardently supports the country’s foundational belief that government should not advocate a particular brand of religion. He encourages people, once they do make that connection to spirituality and faith, to follow where it leads.

“I feel we are called to live whatever it is we understand our faith to be calling us to uniformly,” Kittle says. “And if that calls us to leave our jobs, so be it. People might say that, ‘Well, that means half the people in the world would have to quit their jobs.’ And my response might be, ‘Yeah. So what?'”