Why I want to believe in angels - and thousands do

I've never seen a real angel - a living, breathing being, with feathered wings - but I like the idea of them; the stories of their capacity for flight, these messengers between heaven and earth. The New Age angels seem less mysterious, and therefore less interesting - reduced, in reports of sightings, to the mundane, finding parking spaces and loitering around shopping malls - and so an altogether different species to the dark angels of death and Old Testament destruction.

Rather unfairly, angels of all descriptions have been deemed superstitious flim-flam by many serious contemporary commentators; but Susan Garrett, formerly of the Yale Divinity School, and currently professor at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, has just published a scholarly book that places a host of angels centre-stage in the fundamental questions of life (How did we get here? Where are we going? What does it all mean, anyway?). As a practising Christian, she does not claim to be neutral, but her comparison of biblical accounts of angels with medieval and modern testimonies is immensely thorough, though lacking in the magic of William Blake's vision of a tree filled with angels in Peckham Rye ("their bright wings covered the tree boughs like stars").

A third of Americans say that they have felt an angelic presence in their lives

No Ordinary Angel (Yale University Press £18.99) - Garrett's title refers to her interpretation of Jesus as the best messenger from God - also reports the proliferation of angel sightings in the US since the 1990s; a phenomenon which she does not quite explain, though it is clear that as a nation, America tends to think that an angel is not just for Christmas.

According to a recent survey, 71 per cent of Americans believe in angels, though only 47 per cent in Darwin's theory of evolution. In other surveys, a third of Americans say that they have personally felt an angelic presence in their lives; a belief made manifest in even the briefest trawl through the internet, which reveals a modern ether, where angels proliferate, as if emerging through a gap in Jacob's ladder between heaven and earth.