When I shared an earlier draft of this article with a colleague who spends much more time in the modern theological world than I do, his reply was simple: “So, angels are a thing? And people want to talk about them?” Angels receive fairly short shrift in most twentieth- and twenty-first-century theology, but in late antique Christianity they certainly were “a thing,” if by “a thing” we mean an
... [Show full abstract] essential part of religious discourse, manifest in textual and material sources that testify to the significance of angels in theological speculation, popular piety, and ascetic practice.