"From car parts makers to fast food chains to financial service companies, corporations across the country are bringing chaplains into the workplace. At most companies, the chaplaincy resembles the military model, which calls for chaplains to serve the religiously diverse community before them, not to evangelize.

...Chaplaincy programs are voluntary and confidential, experts said, and free to employees. There are no statistics about the scope of such programs, but Mr. Miller estimated that 600 to 700 companies in the United States have chaplaincies, twice as many as five years ago.

Gil Stricklin, founder and head chaplain of the nonprofit Marketplace Chaplains USA in Dallas, said his firm was signing up one new company every three days, compared with one company every four months when it started 22 years ago. Fortune 500 companies never responded to him a few years ago, he said; now he is negotiating with one that has 175,000 employees.

...Companies tailor the chaplaincy program to their culture. Cardone Industries, a Philadelphia company that refurbishes auto parts for resale, draws its chaplains, almost all lay people, from its employees. Other corporations, like American LubeFast and Herr Foods, contract with an outside company like Marketplace Chaplains to provide chaplains. Some, like Tyson Foods, which started its program in 1999, have their own chaplains, 127 of them at about 250 of the company's more than 300 plants in North America, said Allen Tyson, the company's head chaplain, who is not related to the founders of the company.

... Turnover is down sharply at Glen Allen, which, like about half of Tyson plants, is unionized. But it is unclear how much of the decline can be attributed to the chaplaincy program, managers there said."

"Workplace chaplaincies are generally less costly to operate than the more familiar employee assistance program model of counseling and making referrals. Most chaplaincies also go beyond such programs to bring something of the local pastor to the workplace: the person who is on call around the clock to rush to the hospital when an employee has been in a car accident, or to find housing for families burned out of their houses, or to visit a worker's relative in jail, even to officiate at weddings and funerals.

'You're at work 8 to 10 hours a day, so that is where you spend a lot of your productive time,' said Tim Embry, owner of American LubeFast, a chain of oil change companies in the Southeast. 'Work is where people are at and where they need to be cared for.'

...Though he leads a small local church, Mr. Willis is on call for Tyson all the time. In his 18 months here, he has spoken at funerals, visited employees in the hospital, arranged housing, food and diapers for families flooded out of their homes, helped people devise simple budgets and open bank accounts. When he discovered that several employees did not have enough money to pay their utilities and have a Thanksgiving dinner, he collected money to assemble Thanksgiving meals for them, which he delivered.

Employees come to him because they feel uncomfortable seeing a counselor or social worker. Some have no church of their own. Others may feel too embarrassed about their problems to go to their own pastors. Or it may simply be because he is there, right by the entrance, and willing to help.

...One morning, Mary Jones sat by Mr. Willis's desk and cried softly. She had lost her car and was on the verge of losing her house, her job and her grip on a life that had taken so long to build. Mr. Willis helped her secure her house and then found people to replace her leaky roof for free.

"No one never done anything like this for me before," she said, "what he helped me to do.""

Although the retreat from marriage in the United States, expressed in declining marriage rates and increasing age of first marriage, is well documented, a study by three Mississippi sociologists finds that the extent of that retreat varies considerably according to one's faith tradition. In general, the more "conservative" the faith tradition, the greater likelihood that its members will marry and will marry at an earlier age, relative to their peers from a more liberal faith tradition or no tradition.

The researchers analyzed the first wave of data of the National Survey of Families and Households, working with a sample of more than 10,000 respondents. They found that both men and women who are Mormon, conservative Protestant, or moderate Protestant reveal a "greater propensity" to marry -and to marry at considerably younger ages - than the unaffiliated. In terms of the age of first marriage, Mormons marry earlier than conservative Protestants, who marry earlier than moderate Protestants, although the differences between these three groups were not statistically significant.

Although their faith tradition would be considered conservative, Catholics stood somewhere between the early marrying Mormons and Protestants and the later marrying liberal Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated. In fact, the statistical tests yielded no significant differences in marriage timing between Catholics and liberal Protestants. Persons of the Jewish faith, as well as liberal Protestants and the unaffiliated, were found to be the most likely to postpone or delay marriage.

These findings withstood a variety of controls for sociodemographic factors, including education and employment status, that affect marriage timing, leading the researchers to conclude: "The strength and persistence of these patterned associations further demonstrate that there are robust and multifaceted linkages between two prominent social institutions, namely, religion and marriage."