"Inspired by his own experience with great psychiatry and by his deeply Trinitarian Christian faith, Howard Butt had the courage to write a book about the healing of relationships and its effect on the individual and the society in which both 'disciplines' are fully integrated.

"By using the Apostle Peter's gradual growth from a compulsive, moody man to a wise and wholesome witness for Jesus, Howard Butt not only throws new light on the Gospel stories but also on the spiritual significance of emotional and mental healing.

"A deeply personal, spiritually challenging book about the full meaning of healing and wholeness."

"Full of insight, this book offers valid, profound, and inspiring leadership to the nation and to evangelical Christianity in particular."

"Like the great prophets, he does not forecast the future, but he tells us where we are, right now . . . I wish this courageous and realistically hopeful book could be required reading for all lay and ordained people in all denominations."

"I am enormously impressed by Howard Butt's book. It is highly original, and it has a kind of direct, uncluttered quality, as if Howard Butt is seeing things with clean new eyes. He really does connect the Bible's stark messages with the facts of the world in which we live. Serious Christians, and serious others, can learn from this book."

"Howard Butt has given us all a splendid gift. The gift comes packaged in spiritual wisdom informed by psychological truth. Inside the package we discover the intimate linkage between spiritual struggle and psychological pathologies. But the real treasure is the insight we get for our own healing as we walk with Butt himself through the dark places of his own soul. More than richly informative, this book could indeed be the beginning of the renewal of America's soul."

"Renewing America's Soul is a pioneer example of interdisciplinary thinking. Howard E. Butt, Jr., a businessman with keen interest in theology and psychology born of personal faith and emotional need, uses orthodox Christian doctrine to illumine the darkness of the soul as well as the insights of classical psychology to interpret the spiritual yield of theological understanding. This is an honest, provocative, and powerful volume—and it reads so interestingly."

"Howard Butt's willingness to be vulnerable about his personal struggle with depression and the help that psychiatry provided makes a compelling backdrop for his examination of relationships - familial and societal. His treatment of the concepts of authority and submission in the light of Scripture offers new insight that is desperately needed today, and his challenge to the Christian community (Church ?) to change relationally is right on target. That Howard Butt's ideas have great relevance can be seen in the loving integrity of his own life."

"Fresh, innovative, more than readable. Howard Butt brings an honest and discerning eye to Scripture, combines it with provocative insight into human nature and comes up with a powerful prescription for America's troubled soul. I especially like his call to ordinary people to seize their potential to do what we too often think only specialists can do."

"I have been acquainted with Howard Butt and Laity Lodge for over twenty years. Howard, personally, and Laity Lodge, institutionally, have been a vital, powerful force for bridging the gap between a faulty, sacred-secular dichotomy. Howard has a unique ability to bring Bible scholars, theologians, ministers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and pastoral counselors, along with interested people, together to share ideas and learn from each other. Untold numbers of people have had life-changing and healing experiences through the ministry of Laity Lodge. We have discovered we are all flawed to one degree or another and are called to minister to each other. We have learned each is a vital member of the church (the Body of Christ) and through sharing, encouraging, confronting, and loving we promote health and healing for ourselves and others.

"I believe Renewing America's Soul deals with the most basic, universal problems all people and institutions face. Unfortunately, the basics that Howard has described so well are often ignored or misunderstood; thus destructive history repeats itself. Conflicts between authority and submission are at the very heart of all conflicts that involve significant relationships. Howard's concept of the Trinity as the model and source of healing for these conflicts is profound, provocative, and, I think, correct.

"The appropriate flexibility between authority and submission that is modeled between God the Father and God the Son through the person and power of the Holy Spirit is ultimately the basis for healing for all relational conflicts. A person who enters into a relationship with the Trinity through their own confession, repentance (submission) receives the gift of the Trinity's presence through the Holy Spirit and, thus, finds a basis for healthy authority if the appropriate flexibility is developed, aided and abetted by God's presence.

"Many needless and destructive conflicts between males/females, government/populous, employer/employee, clergy/laity could be avoided or healed if flexible Trinitarian theology and psychology were understood and practiced.

"I applaud Howard for dealing with difficult concepts and issues so well and modeling for us his own experience in 'Trinitarian flexibility.'"

"Howard Butt, Jr., in this carefully crafted work, has done an original and intriguing work of combining the depths of his own personal pilgrimage with illness that called for psychiatric help with the best of psychological wisdom. He uses an exciting study of the life of Simon Peter and a profound exegesis of I Peter. He probes the meaning of equality and mutual submission in the home, at work, and in the nation in the light of Biblical theology and psychological wisdom.

"I was especially informed by his treatment of the equality of submission in the Kingdom of Heaven in which we 'outdo one another in showing honor.' (Rom. 12:10)

"Butt gives us the strong meat of the Word of God in his mature instruction. His book is for serious, adult inquiry in churches, corporate board rooms, and seminary classes."

"Howard Butt's unique credentials have enabled him to write a book that is filled with biblical and secular wisdom. It deserves reading by every thoughtful Christian. It will shed light and challenge as well as encourage."

"In this day of America's obsession with soul search, Christian businessman and lay leader, Howard E. Butt, Jr., speaks movingly and discerningly from his personal journey and keenly focused insights. Though he disclaims scholarly expertise, his understanding of what we have discovered about both the mind and the soul reflects the best of scholarship as well as experience. This book is important to our dilemma of dealing with the complexities of a new age with the basic principles which have made our nation strong."

"All of my adult life I have tried to live my life in keeping with the servant-leadership concept which you so beautifully develop in Renewing America's Soul but I never knew what to call it or how to be specific about its origins. Like most, sometimes I fail and occasionally I succeed, but the beauty is in the concept.

"You have put your finger on the pulse of our problems and then laid out the answer."

"All too often psychiatry and spirituality are pitted against each other, as antagonists. Howard E. Butt, Jr. does a masterful job of bringing them together, with each field informing the other. I learned a lot."

"Howard Butt knows that biblical teaching is revealed wisdom, that God's identity is one of tripersonal love, that light and power flow from this tri-unity for the healing of human relationships that sin has put out of joint, and that North American society at every level needs the radical relational reconstruction that only Trinitarian faith can supply. Thinker, philanthropist, and businessman, Butt has the mind and style of a prophet, and it is fascinating to follow his visionary opening up of the tremendous themes with which he deals. This is a book for repeated reading; it grows on you, with renewing force."

"In Renewing America's Soul, Howard Butt, coming out of a strong Evangelical background, gives us, with great integrity and vulnerability, a painful, poignant but ultimately happy picture of the renewing of his own mind and soul through the insights of psychiatry and biblical theology.

"Then he blends these insights and uses them as a lens to help us see how we in the church and other institutions in America can begin to understand the paradoxes, denial, and dysfunctional teaching which has so often caused us to become stuck in our personal and family relationships, and in ever-widening circles, in our relations to the people we work with and try to influence—to the ends of the earth.

"This is not an easy book to read, but I strongly suspect that if a number of leaders in the Evangelical Church would read these pages and take their content seriously, a spiritual renewal of hope and reconciliation could be born in the midst of the great sea of pain, fear, and alienation in which many of us in America are floundering."

"From effective parenting to the psychology of suffering, to biblical wisdom, Howard Butt renews the reader's soul in a deeply refreshing way."

"Howard Butt has given us a wonderful insight into the blending of theology and psychology. Listen and learn from him—you will be lifted and well led!"

"Reading Renewing America's Soul I shared in a few hours the lifelong broad Christian thinking of an outstanding lay scholar. I was lifted on emotional waves high above my normal experience. He showered me with metaphors I shall long remember. Thank you, Howard. I have been blessed by your suffering and resurrection."