Memorial Day weekend 2014: time for another installment of my ongoing struggle to understand the America for which people kill and die.  We have general agreement that Memorial Day began as a way to commemorate the hundreds of thousands who died in the Civil War.  Today, we allow that the parades and picnics and, in Indianapolis, a gigantic car race, do nothing to detract from the solemnity of the occasion.  As religious historian Conrad Cherry wrote in 1969, “Memorial Day is part of an American ceremonial calendar…a sacred day when the war dead are mourned, the spirit of redemptive sacrifice Read more