Lunchtime Bible study groups, flexible hours that allow Jewish employees to leave early Friday in time to light Sabbath candles and Muslim employees to leave work for Friday afternoon prayers and on-site meditation rooms. These days more employers are accommodating religious practices.

What for many people used to be confined to their home or house of worship is now finding expression on the job.

"People are becoming a lot more open about their religious practices, and unwilling to shut off that part of themselves at work," says Michelle Weber, who directs the Religious Diversity in the Workplace program at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding in New York.

While a 2002 study by Human Resource Executive magazine found only 10 percent of companies said they had a formal religion accommodation policy, and only one in five said they allowed meetings in the workplace for prayer or religious purposes, Weber and other experts sense an increasing number of employers are becoming more accepting of religious expression on the job.

Workers feel increasingly comfortable asking their bosses to accommodate their religious requirements because the mood in the country is more accepting of discussions of religion and spirituality in general, Weber says.

When employees hear the country's leaders openly discuss their religious beliefs and how they guide their decision-making, they feel free to discuss the same things in their own workplace, she says.

Part of the new openness to religion also may be attributable to a number of lawsuits in the late 1990s brought by workers who said their religious rights were being infringed, says Don McCormick, a business professor at California's University of Redlands, who teaches a course on spirituality in the workplace.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans religious discrimination in the workplace and requires that employers make reasonable efforts to accommodate their workers' religious needs.

The trend has been for courts to broaden the scope of workers' rights in this regard, says Barry Willoughby, chairman of the employment law department at Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor, a Wilmington, Del., law firm.

Willoughby says it's not easy for employers to know where the lines are, because the law speaks in general terms, and the courts interpret it on a case-by-case basis.

The courts' decisions are "very specific to the case, the nature of the job and the employee's religious needs," he says.

Experts say many stressed-out workers want to bring their spiritual values, as well as their religion, into the office.

To respond, a growing number of companies are offering workplace chaplains to help them better cope with life's problems.

"I think companies are offering more of a variety of things that help workers who are going through a spiritual crisis," says the Rev. Diana Dale, executive director of the National Institute of Business and Industrial Chaplains.

While many employers are more accepting of religious expressions by their employees, the rules should be different for the boss, says Ellen Barrosse, CEO of Synchrogenix, a Wilmington-based company with 35 employees that does marketing and advertising and also writes reports for pharmaceutical companies.

Barrosse, a devout Catholic, is president of the Wilmington chapter of Legatus, an international organization of Catholic businesspeople, whose mission is to help them grow in their faith.

Still, she says she wouldn't put a religious symbol on her office wall, because that could give workers the impression that promotions or assignments depend on sharing her faith.

"How would you feel if your boss had a lot of religious symbols on their office wall relating to a religion you don't belong to?" she says.