Editor's Note: Please forgive me for the delay on the Rev. Rick Warren's book. There's so much wrong with what the guy says that I'm finding it hard to summarize adequately and have now decided to attack his deception piecemeal in a series rather than with an overall critique (which I scrapped just yesterday). Here’s a little something to fill the void.

Last summer, heading back from the beach at Coney Island, I was talking to a guy about the Bible when he said, "Tell me another book that's influenced you that has nothing to do with the Bible."

After some thought, I told him a sentimental favorite of mine has always been "Dear Theo," a compilation of intimate private letters Vincent van Gogh wrote his brother, Theo, in the 1870s and 1880s which were later translated and edited by Irving Stone in 1937.

As I told the man on the train, I had re-read the book at least four times since first reading it in my early 20s. My now dog-eared and Scotch-taped paperback copy is filled with faded ink underlinings, stars and margin notations.

I've got Vincent's paintings and drawings—most of it ripped out of art books I've purchased—hung on nearly all walls of my studio, including in the bathroom. Some are framed and others are just neatly trimmed and tacked up as is.

The prints include Self-portrait with Straw Hat, Peasant Woman, Potato Eaters, The Good Samaritan, The Sower, The Gardener, The Church in Auvers, Café Terrace at Night, Twelve Sunflowers in a Vase, Night Café, Weaver at the Loom, Peasant Girl, The Postman, Dr. Gachet and Fisherman with Sou'wester .

Vincent's portraitures have an uncanny way of bringing out the inner character of his subjects, especially through his intense focus on their eyes and mouth. "I'd rather paint peoples' eyes than cathedrals," he once wrote to this brother.

My affinity for the individuals, some of whom he writes about in his letters, has grown from all the years they've been with me, always in sight here in my small Manhattan studio. Vincent himself stares at me from my reading, eating and television-viewing spot at the corner of my futon near the window.

Dr. Gachet, who is atop my bookcase next to my desk, became a dear friend of Vincent's near the very end of his life after Gachet accepted a request by Theo to take care of mentally ailing Vincent in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris (where Vincent completed 80 paintings in a 18-month period!).

When Vincent, on Jan. 27, 1890, went out at dusk into the fields and shot himself in the chest with a revolver, leading to his death in his brother's arms two days later, Gachet had been the one to dress his wounds and notify Theo.

In the portrait of Gachet, he wears a French-style coat and hat and sits at a table with his elbow propped up, leaning his face into his left hand. He has a glum look of exasperation and futility.

Vincent himself writes of the painting, "I have a portrait of Gachet with the heartbroken expression of our time—something like what Gauguin said of his 'Christ in the Garden of Olives,' not meant to be understood , but there; anyhow, we follow him."

A lot of people don't know this, but Vincent, the son of a Protestant vicar, originally intended to devote his life to Christian missionary and evangelism work among poor people.

In his early 20s, he attended an evangelist school near Brussels before it was deemed he was unsuitable for the lay-preaching profession.

Undaunted, Vincent continued his desired vocation at his own discretion, living in extreme poverty for a year in the Belgium coal-mining area of Cuesmes. He visited sick people and read and preached the Bible to the illiterate miners.

In one letter, Vincent relays his fervent longing to be a "sower of God's Word" to "this peculiar population of labourers."

He writes, "One of the roots or foundations not only for the Gospel, but of the whole Bible is, 'Light that rises in the darkness.' From darkness to light. Well, who will need this most, who will have ears for it? Experience has taught that those who walk in the darkness, in the centre of the earth, like the miners in the black coal mines, are very much impressed by the words of the Gospel, and believe it too."

Variously conveyed by Vincent to his brother was his "yearning towards the Bible." He writes, "I read it daily, but I should like to know it by heart, to study thoroughly and lovingly all those old stories, and especially to find out what is known about Christ."

In a letter dated December, 1878, he reports of the coal residue on fresh snow, "With the snow the effect just now is of black characters on white paper, like the pages of the Gospel."

Vincent details in the same letter a Bible lecture he'd given the miners. Here's the passage:

"At a meeting this week my text was Acts 16:9—'And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; there stood a man of Macedonia and begged him saying: Come over into Macedonia and help us.' And they listened attentively when I tried to describe what that Macedonian was like, who needed and longed for the comfort of the Gospel and for the knowledge of the only true God. How we must think of him as a labourer with lines of sorrow and suffering and fatigue in his face, without splendour or glamour, but with an immortal soul, who needs the food that does not perish, namely, God's Word. And God wills that in imitation of Christ, man should live humbly and go through life, not reaching after lofty gains, but adapting himself to the lowly, learning from the Gospel to be meek and simple of heart.

"People here are very ignorant and untaught; most of them cannot read, but at the same time they are intelligent and quick in their difficult work, brave and frank, of small stature but square-shouldered with melancholy deep-set eyes.

"They are handy in many things, and work terribly hard. They have a nervous temperament; I do not mean weak, but very sensitive. They have an innate, deeply rooted hatred and a deep mistrust of everybody who would try to domineer over them.

"With the charcoal-burners one must have a charcoal-burner's character and temperament and no pretentious pride or mastery, or one would never get on with them or gain their confidence."

Vincent departed from the miners in 1879 in the midst of his first deep, dark spat of "melancholy," a word he liked to use instead of depression. For a time, he even stopped writing to his brother because Theo had criticized his choice of evangelism as a profession.

Sadly, this is also the time Vincent started moving away from his faith in the Bible. Once settled in the cosmopolitan city of Paris, art seemed to take over and the ultra-sensitive Vincent became encumbered by the art world's competitiveness, jealousies, intellectual one-upmanships, rejections, backbitings, loneliness, on and on.

Three years before his death, he wrote to Theo, "I feel more and more that we must not judge God on the basis of this world; it's a study that didn't come off. What can you do in a study that has gone wrong, if you are fond of the artist? You do not find much to criticize; you hold your tongue. But you have a right to ask for something better. It is only a master who can make such a muddle, and perhaps that is the best consolation we have out of it, since then we have a right to hope that we'll see the same creative hand get even with itself. As this life of ours, so much criticized, and for such good and even exalted reasons—we must not take it for anything but what it is, and go on hoping that in some other life we'll see a better thing than this."

Vincent allowed himself to resent God for the things that went wrong out of his own, self-willed choices in life. What he learned in the most destructive fashion is there is no victory or peace in such a heart attitude and the burden of isolation from rejecting God is a heavy and deadly one. It's a prison, in fact.

As he himself once wrote to Theo, "There are two kinds of idleness that form a great contrast. There is the man who is idle from laziness and from lack of character, from the baseness of his nature. You may if you like take me for such a one. Then there is the other idle man, who is idle in spite of himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action, because he seems to be imprisoned in some cage. A just or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, fatal circumstances, adversity—they are what make men prisoners. And the prison is also called prejudice, misunderstanding, fatal ignorance of one thing or another, distrust, false shame. One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but nevertheless, one feels certain barriers, certain walls."