In hard times, many people turn to religion. A shaman’s incense burned in Mongolia.

As the Great Recession drags on and the so-called economic experts remain baffled, a question arises: Does God offer bailouts?

Whether he does or doesn’t, people of a variety of faiths have exhausted other options. So they are turning to the divine for solutions to their financial quandaries.

“This economy,” Stanley Fish, an author and professor, wrote in a New York Times blog, “is underwritten by a power so great and beneficent that it turns failures into treasures. Some economists identify that power as the market and ask us to have faith in it. God might be a better candidate.”

For some jobless workers, the higher calling stems from practical reality. A seminary in Rochester, New York, recently reported that 10 percent of its incoming students said they had enrolled after being laid off from a previous job, Samuel G. Freedman wrote in The Times. Unfortunately, the religious job market is as bad as the rest of the economy, and openings for ministers and rabbis are down throughout the United States and Canada. (Roman Catholic priests are the exception, Mr. Freedman wrote.)

“There’s more need than ever for the work of the church, so it’s ironic we’re not exempt from the same factors as everybody else,” Lynette Sparks, a Presbyterian minister, told Mr. Freedman.

The shamans in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, are having better luck. They are thriving as unemployed and struggling workers come to them for guidance, Dan Levin wrote in The Times.

“In the old days people asked for rain,” Chinbat, 30, an electrical engineer turned shaman, told Mr. Levin. “Today they ask for money.”

For those who don’t have a shaman to consult, religious texts offer no shortage of financial advice. The Bible, Mr. Fish wrote, contains some 2,350 verses dealing with money and property.

Offering an update for 21st-century economies, Pope Benedict XVI recently put forth some business guidelines in an encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” or “Charity in Truth.” Calling for “a true world political authority” to supervise the economy and for financiers to “rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity,” his advice does not fit neatly into the political doctrine of the left or the right, Rachel Donadio and Laurie Goodstein wrote in The Times.

“There are paragraphs that sound like Ayn Rand, next to paragraphs that sound like ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ That’s quite intentional,” Vincent J. Miller, a theologian, told the reporters. “He’ll wax poetically about the virtuous capitalist, but then he’ll give you this very clear analysis of the ways in which global capital and the shareholder system cause managers to focus on short-term good at the expense of the community, of workers, of the environment.”

Back in Ulan Bator, Suhbat Shagdariin, the president of the Golomt Center for Shamanism, also attested to the power of divine financial guidance. He told Mr. Levin a story of two people who came to the center after losing money gambling in Las Vegas. As Mr. Suhbat tells it, they followed the advice of a shaman, returned to Las Vegas, and won $2 million.

“The shaman worked here,” Mr. Suhbat told Mr. Levin. “But the spirits went there.”