It s the time of year when evening classes are enrolling. There is so much choice. Should one sign up for Angel, Spirituality and Healing? Or maybe learn how to Connect with your Angels or explore Working with Angels? How about Angels in your Daily Life? There are plenty of others just like these coming to local schools and colleges over the coming months. You'd need wings to get around to them all, writes Shane Hegarty.
In the US, the classroom is still a place where angels fear to tread, but the fact that creationist theory may be finding its way back into some schools in the guise of intelligent design has excited much comment.
President Bush s endorsement of that policy was particularly controversial, if not necessarily surprising, but telling reporters that "both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about," has emphasised how serious this has become.
On this side of the Atlantic, these developments are watched and greeted with a mixture of bafflement, dismay and derision.
The anti-evolution movement represents everything we consider pathetic and laughable about America's educational standards, fondness for Christian fundamentalism and overall retreat from reason.
More than that, the president's support adds colour to the caricature of Bush as a dangerous half-wit. If there is such a thing as intelligent design, goes the obvious joke, then how does one account for George Bush?
Yet, in Irish and British newspapers, one can read derisive commentary on America's embracing of hogwash on one page, before turning to the horoscopes on another. Criticism needs to be shouted above the din of our very own march towards unreason.
Ireland is awash with hokum. Thanks to psychic phonelines, astrology, aura reading, crystals, reiki and homeopathy, these are profitable days for the mumbo-jumbo industry. Plenty believe in this stuff, of course.
They will argue that traditional science does not have all the answers, that there are things beyond the physical that must be accounted for, and they will even brandish questionable studies as supporting proof. You could easily mistake the rhetoric for that of a creationist.
The angel phenomenon has been particularly striking. Following a lengthy downturn, they have been prodded into action over the past decade by believers, alternative healers, authors and trinket-sellers alike.
Angels provide a bridge between established religion and the contemporary appeal of superstition, while providing a buffer against the idea that we stumble blindly through life.
They sit equally well in the church, in a psychic's room or on an alternative healer's table. And now, they find lodgings in our schools and colleges.
They wouldn't dare allow angel therapy on a standard curriculum, but are happy to allow them into the evening schedules for the opportunity of adding a few extra euro to the annual budget. And they won't even blush to be associated with them on the evening classes brochure.
Obviously, renting out an otherwise empty classroom for private classes is a long way from giving supernatural conjecture and scientific fact equal footing on an official school curriculum.
Yet, it is one thing for someone to run a course on Astral Travelling ("safely leave your body") at a private address, but quite another for a school to not only host this quite modern form of quackery, but to keep a straight face as it advertises angel therapy beside basic car maintenance or beginner's French.
The campaign in favour of intelligent design is calculated to blur the lines, to suggest that it is about allowing "debate" when one can no more have a debate on creationism than one can on whether the earth is flat or not. It is the frontline in a battle against both science and history and factuality.
Yet, on evenings throughout the autumn and winter, Irish schools will also witness minor victories against sense. It will happen quietly, because of a general attitude that it does no harm if people want to believe in that sort of thing, and because schools need extra money regardless of whether its comes with a sprinkle of angel dust. However, it should somewhat dampen our scorn of the strange US trend.
Until we look into our own retreat from rationality that ridicule will carry with it a strong whiff of cultural arrogance.