Northern Ireland, America and the Emerging Church Movement: Exploring the Significance of Peter Rollins andthe Ikon Collective

The Emerging Church Movement (ECM) is a primarily Western religious phenomenon, identifiable by its critical ‘deconstruction’ of ‘modern’ religion. While most prominent in North America, especially the United States, some of the most significant contributors to the ECM ‘conversation’ have been the Belfast-based Ikon Collective and one of its founders, philosopher Peter Rollins. Their rootedness in the unique religious, political and social landscape of Northern Ireland in part explains their position on the ‘margins’ of the ECM, and provides many of the resources for their contributions. Ikon’s development of ‘transformance art’ and its ‘leaderless’ structure raise questions about the institutional viability of the wider ECM. Rollins’ ‘Pyrotheology’ project, grounded in his reading of post-modern philosophy, introduces more radical ideas to the ECM conversation. Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ and ‘marginal’ location provides the ground from which Rollins and Ikon have been able to expose the boundaries of the ECM and raise questions about just how far the ECM may go in its efforts to transform Western Christianity.

General, PDB-based collective variables for protein folding

New, automated forms of data-analysis are required in order to understand the high-dimensional trajectories that are obtained from molecular dynamics simulations on proteins. Dimensionality reduction algorithms are particularly appealing in this regard as they allow one to construct unbiased, low-dimensional representations of the trajectory using only the information encoded in the trajectory. The downside of this approach is that different sets of coordinates are required for each different chemical systems under study precisely because the coordinates are constructed using information from the trajectory. In this paper we show how one can resolve this problem by using the sketch-map algorithm that we recently proposed to construct a low-dimensional representation of the structures contained in the protein data bank (PDB). We show that the resulting coordinates are as useful for analysing trajectory data as coordinates constructed using landmark configurations taken from the trajectory and that these coordinates can thus be used for understanding protein folding across a range of systems.

Collective synchrony increases prosociality towards non-performers and out-group members

Previous research has found that behavioural synchrony between people leads to greater prosocial tendencies towards co-performers. In this study we investigated the scope of this prosocial effect: does it extend beyond the performance group to an extended in-group (extended parochial prosociality) or even to other people in general (generalized prosociality)? Participants performed a simple rhythmic movement either in time (synchrony condition) or out of time (asynchrony condition) with each other. Before and during the rhythmic movement, participants were exposed to a prime that made salient an extended in-group identity. After the task, half the participants had the opportunity to help an extended in-group member; the other half had the opportunity to help an out-group member. We found a main effect of our synchrony manipulation across both help targets suggesting that the prosocial effects of synchrony extend to non-performers. Furthermore, there was a significantly higher proportion of participants willing to help an out-group member after moving collectively in synchrony. This study shows that under certain intergroup contexts synchrony can lead to generalized prosociality with performers displaying greater prosociality even towards out-group members.