Religious experience is highly personal and is often comprised of atfectual encounters and emotional responses, both within personal space and through ordained sacred spaces. Expanding on recent geographical research, with the aid of semistructured interviews, this paper explores how personal affect and emotion are experienced by members from two houses of worship. The responses highlight the transformative nature of sacred space and its unique capacity to elicit emotional experiences from participants. Further, this study demonstrates that there is a commonality to spiritual experiences, such as a feeling of peace or a sense of being 'home', that cuts across denominational lines, and that these experiences are often spatially grounded.

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As the rising cost of college textbooks has outpaced both inflation and increases in tuition fees, this expense has created a significant barrier to student learning. Some instructors have adopted or created open educational resources, meaning materials which are freely and openly available. While the most obvious benefit of open course content might be cost savings, the fact that these materials can be freely adapted and changed can have substantial impact on the learning experience itself and enable an instructor to completely change the structure and outcomes of a course. This paper provides a case study on writing an open textbook for a course called World Regional Geography and details the writing process and platform options. I also offer practical guidance for faculty interested in authoring open materials and insight into how writing open materials might be framed in terms of a faculty member’s larger portfolio of professional activity.

Cracker Barrel restaurants are a fixture across the interstate landscape of the United States. These sites cultivate a strong sense of place through careful theming, generating a distinct sense of rural America and nostalgia for home. At the same time, the uniformity of Cracker Barrel speaks to the notion of placelessness, the eradication of unique local features and homogenization of experience. Cracker Barrel is thus simultaneously placeless and placefull. This research explores this paradoxical notion by utilizing semiotic analyses in an analysis of user-generated Yelp! photos of Cracker Barrels across the country. It is clear from this analysis that the number and wide variety of artifacts vary surprisingly little from store to store. Together, this uniformity and intentional theming help successfully create a sense of place for Cracker Barrel stores as a rural American, 19th century "home-away-from-home."

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