Jefferson's Religious Beliefs

As he aged, Jefferson spoke passionately about the prospect of meeting loved ones in heaven, assuring a bereaved John Adams after the death of his wife Abigail, that “it is of some comfort to us both that the term is not very distant at which we are to deposit, in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved & lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.” In the end, he seems to have believed in a heaven or, at least, as...