The Gate to the Genius Next Door

They knew that they would never pass this way again …

“The Gate of the World,” Daniel Amos
“Gavin’s Song,” Marc Broussard
“Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You,” Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong
“Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You,” Billie Holiday
“Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes),” Carla Thomas
“Geek in the Pink,” Jason Mraz
“Geek Stink Breath,” Green Day
“Generals and Majors,” XTC
“Genesis 3:23,” Mountain Goats
“Genius Next Door,” Regina Spektor

“Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.” But Mountain Goats fans probably already knew that.

In that Daniel Amos song, Terry Taylor evokes two of the ethical/eschatological stories we were looking at in our discussion of the anger of Team Hell. Here both we and God seem to take turns in the role of Lazarus the beggar — which is a way of looking at the Lazarus story that the story of the sheep and the goats would seem to support. What if we don’t think of God as hovering somewhere above and apart from this story, but what if we recognize that that’s God there, outside the rich man’s home, hungry and alone apart from the dogs licking his wounds?

Anyway, I think of the songs in that list I probably like the oldest ones best. What am I missing?