A Journey toward Connection and Belonging: Autoethnography of a Jewish Student in Christian Higher Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for sharing your forthright reflections with engaging intellectual and spiritual integrity. I was deeply moved by your testimony.

I would further commend your nuanced analysis of the dialectic between social and theological supersessionism. It is, indeed, crucial to distinguish between the two, while honoring theological affirmations without undermining the existential and spiritual dignity of those of different faith commitments. You may consider developing this perspective in a specifically theoretical essay.

Author Response

Thank you for your thoughtful review of my article and affirmative feedback. I appreciate your suggestion for further developing the theory in a future essay. In response to feedback received from the other reviewer and editor, I have expanded the methods section of the paper.

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a timely paper in contemporary North American contexts. The paper is well-written. The prose is excellent, clear, succinct. The findings are also clear and straightforward. With an autoethnography, however, you've really got to be SUPER detailed with the methodology. Ethnography is already considered by many to be a bit of a flimsy method (and I'm an ethnographer saying this), so you've already got to be extremely descriptive in your methods to defend against such attacks. Autoethnography is even more problematic in this way. So, when you say things like "I used multiple sources of data", that is too vague to give much credibility to your method. What sources, exactly? How many? How long did you conduct this introspective study? Did you keep a field journal? Did you conduct self-interviews? What were the nature of the artifacts you collected? How did you choose them? If you can bring evidence of the systematic nature of your self-reflective study to the forefront of your methods section, I think this paper could be a solid contribution to the literature. Otherwise, it won't stand up to scholarly scrutiny. If you can describe in much greater detail the methods you used, it will be easier to defend your writing and ideas to any audience. 

Author Response

Thank you for your thoughtful review of my article and helpful feedback to better articulate the methodology. I sincerely appreciate this feedback, as I continue to develop academic discipline of making the details of my methods more transparent.

I made significant edits to this section, which I renamed Autoethnographic Methodology as suggested by the editor. It now includes the timeframe of the study, how data were generated and recorded including more details about how the journal was used, and how themes were identified.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

You definitely made the methodology section more compelling, well-referenced, etc. Well done.