FANTASY AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT: Finding Out Who You Are and What You Would Like to Be

If there is a fad in theology these days, it is to conceive of religion as the shaping of life stories. This, Cooper's fifteenth book (others have titles like Celluloid and Symbols, Religion in the Age of Aquarius, Getting It Together), is a breathlessly up-to-date entry in this trend's lightweight division. It is based on the potentially rich insight that each of us has a personal life story, a unique fantasy that is the key to the sort of person we are and the fundamental reason for our likes and dislikes, choices, lifestyle. Cooper develops this idea up to a point in terms of religions, faiths which involve families of fantasies shared by adherents and the universal impulse to fabricate stories, and anxiety to achieve a good death. Any real analysis never materializes and one gets instead a rambling of quotes, offhand remarks, connective leaps, awful poetry and tiresome autobiography.