With its support, he rededicated himself to serving God, and by his senior year he was running his own Bible-study group, hoping to inoculate first-year students against the temptations he had faced.

On the eve of Professor Hill's testimony, Justice Thomas asked that two couples who were friends from a Bible-study group be called in for prayers.

The Fellowship of Companies for Christ International, a Christian group, estimates that 10,000 Bible-study and prayer groups meet in the workplace.

However, the part about the Bible-study group had little to do with the story.

A teenage Bible-study group meets every Wednesday evening to talk about issues like dating and gangs.

Then there are small, private counseling and Bible-study groups, both Catholic and evangelical, which raise their own money.

The second strand derives from the Bible-study group, in which men and (more recently) women came together to extract meaning from a sacred text.

Sponsors of small, informal religious gatherings, such as Bible-study groups in hotel rooms, have been detained, fined, and expelled, although these outcomes have become less common because of improvements to religious freedom.

"Once the courts had held that a public university had to allow politically subversive groups to meet, it seemed crazy, like lunacy, to say that a Bible-study group couldn't meet," he says.

His public stances led last March to calls for his resignation by the Men's Class, a Bible-study group founded in the 1890's.