With Uncle Marc's help, Larkin becomes an academic historian but leaves the Christian faith. Unknown to Asha, Uncle Marc had previously re-established contact with his long-lost half-sister Lauren. Marc claimed that the "Crusaders" were rogue elements who do not represent Christian America. He tells Asha that her mother is dead, and never told Lauren he had found her daughter. With Jarret's legacy in disgrace, Lauren's Earthseed religion grows in popularity in a post-war United States, funding scholarships for needy university students and encouraging humanity to leave Earth and settle Alpha Centauri. After Asha learns that Lauren is her biological mother, she manages to meet with her mother. Though Asha is unable to forgive her mother for choosing Earthseed over her, Lauren tells her daughter that her door is always open to her. After learning that her half-brother Uncle Marc hid the fact that Asha was related to Lauren, Lauren severs all ties with her estranged brother. Lauren dies at the age of 81 while watching the first shuttles leaving Earth for the starship "Christopher Columbus", which carries settlers in suspended animation to Alpha Centauri. Jana Diemer Llewellyn regards "Parable of the Talents" as a harsh indictment of religious fundamentalism and compares the novel to Joanna Russ' "The Female Man" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale". The "Los Angeles Times" op-ed editor Abby Aguirre has likened the religious fundamentalism and authoritarianism of President Jarret to the "Make America Great Again" rhetoric of the Trump Administration. Butler had planned to write a third "Parable" novel, tentatively titled "Parable of the Trickster", which would have focused on the community's struggle to survive on a new planet. She began this novel after finishing "Parable of the Talents", and mentioned her work on it in a number of interviews, but at some point encountered a writer's block. She eventually shifted her creative attention, resulting in "Fledgling", her final novel. The various false starts for the novel can now be found among Butler's papers at the Huntington Library, as described in an article at the "Los Angeles Review of Books".