At Harvard, more students are enrolling in religion courses and regularly attending religious services, Gomes said. Presbyterian ministries at Berkeley and Wisconsin have built dormitories to offer spiritual services to students and encourage discussion among different faiths. The seven-story building on the Wisconsin campus, which will house 280 students, is to open in August.

At Colgate, five Buddhist and Hindu students received permission to live in a new apartment complex on the edge of campus this year. They call their apartment Asian Spirituality House and they use it for meetings and occasional religious events.

The number of student religious organizations at Colgate has grown to 11 from 5 in recent years. The university's Catholic, Protestant and Jewish chaplains oversee an array of programs and events. Many involve providing food to students, a phenomenon that the university chaplain, Mark Shiner, jokingly calls "gastro-evangelism."

Among the new clubs is one created last year to encourage students to hold wide-ranging dialogues about spirituality and faith. Meeting over lunch on Thursdays in the chapel's basement, the students talk about what happens when you die or the nature of Catholic spirituality.

Called the Heretics Club (the chaplains were looking to grab students' attention), the group listened to John Gattuso talk about his book, "Talking to God: Portrait of a World at Prayer" (Stone Creek Publications, 2006), a collection of essays and photos about prayer in world religions.

"Do you need to believe in God in order to pray?" Gattuso asked.

The discussion was off and running, with one student saying one needed only to believe in "something outside yourself" and another saying that "sometimes 'Thank you' can be a prayer."

Afterward, several students talked about what attracted them to the sessions, besides the sandwiches, chips and fruit. Gabe Conant, a junior, said he wanted to contemplate personal questions about his own faith. He described them this way: "What are these things I was raised in and do I want to keep them?"