As we start to name an aspect of his existence which long remained unspoken, namely his engagement and wrestling with his own identity as inhabiting a white body, interpreting and understanding Dietrich Bonhoeffer today is perhaps more complex than ever. The White Bonhoeffer offers the first serious attempt to understand the theologian's doctrine and writing through the lens of critical whiteness. Through ongoing attentiveness to Black theologies of liberation, and the life and thought of Bonhoeffer, and drawing on both theological concepts and the author's own personal narrative, the book highlights and offers some constructive ways towards living less violently, and more penitently, for those who inhabit White bodies in a White world.

Tim Judson's The White Bonhoeffer invites us into a postcolonial pilgrimage to consider whiteness and racism through a careful critique of Bonhoeffer's theology. It is a thoroughly compelling book, well researched and grounded in a solid familiarity with Bonhoeffer. But it is more than that. This book is a necessary challenge to those who would, at best, fail to examine the complicity in Bonhoeffer's work, and at worst, co-opt Bonhoeffer for unjust purposes. Judson's nuanced treatment of Bonhoeffer is both welcome and timely and is highly recommended. It encourages each of us in our own journeys out of whiteness (in its vast array of forms and effects) and toward social justice and community. Judson skillfully does this whilst honouring the legacy of the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, who, even eighty years after his death, prompts us to ask who Christ is for us, here and now.

Throughout the Psalms we witness David cry out for deliverance in seasons of anguish and grief, seeking refuge and strength from the Lord. Likewise, Jesus petitioned God in the garden of Gethsemane for strength in a time of dire need. The cries from both David and Jesus to God reflect the forgotten spiritual discipline of lament. Lament is not sorrow without ultimate hope--that is despair. Rather, lament is trust in God despite, and even by way of, the experience of hopelessness.

In Awake in Gethsemane Tim Judson envisions the place and meaning of lament for the Christian community through close engagement with the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. After documenting the historical decline and current lack of lament within much of the Western Church, Judson offers a threefold approach to the subject, arguing that a basis for lament is necessarily located in theology, ethics, and liturgy interdependently. This relationship frames the critical work carried out alongside Bonhoeffer, interpreting lament through his Christology, ecclesiology, and biblical exegesis. A constructive lamentology emerges, aimed to facilitate the church's engagement with some critical contemporary issues.

Judson presents lament as a faithful aspect of the truly human life which, in and through Christ, is for and with others. Lament is a means by which disciples stay awake with Christ in Gethsemane in a wounded world where sin, suffering, and sorrow abide. Such an outlook challenges prevalent ideological horizons and common presuppositions about lament which preclude or distort this crucial spiritual discipline. Hence, Judson opens new imaginative possibilities for construing lament positively and creatively, witnessing to the reality that faithful freedom is embodied perfectly by the lamenting Jesus himself, who, by way of his own lament, is the salvation of the world.