Latest news with #Christ'sCollege
Otago Daily Times
29-05-2025
- Sport
- Otago Daily Times
Christ's College v CBHS: Historic rivalry still going strong after 133 years
CBHS centre William Brown heads for the try line. PHOTO: THOMAS BIRD No schoolboy rugby rivalry in Canterbury compares to the storied clash between Christchurch Boys' High School and Christ's College. The two schools first met on the rugby field in 1892. On Tuesday, they will face off for the 140th time in round four of the Miles Toyota Premiership (1pm). Boys' High has historically dominated with 87 wins to Christ's College's 43. Nine matches have ended in a draw. 'For our lads, it's one of those games they look forward to from when they start school in year 9 and 10,' said Christ's College head coach Sam Broomhall. 'For some of them it might be the biggest game they play in their rugby careers.' This year's match will be played at Christ's College for the first time since 2020 after resurfacing work was completed on its upper field. Broomhall said he expected a typically buoyant crowd. 'The atmosphere and the environment that this game creates is quite unique and special. 'It's an amazing job they did with the field there and the facilities. 'It's a bit of a cauldron, a real sort of coliseum arena in there, so it's a great place to play and watch a game of rugby.' Christ's College has had a slow start to the season, managing just one win from three outings – a 38-37 thriller against Rangiora High – bookended by close losses to St Thomas' and Selwyn Schools. In contrast, Boys' High is unbeaten and riding the high of knocking over defending champions Nelson College 58-31 on Saturday, a win that also saw them claim the Trust Bank Cup. 'We're really looking forward to it,' said Boys' High head coach Pete Chaplin on Tuesday's match. 'It means a lot. It's a big day for both schools and their communities.' Chaplin said with all the hype and attention on the game he would need to keep his charges focused on the task at hand. 'We're just going out and playing another game of rugby, doing the little things right. 'It's a good challenge for young sportsmen to be in an environment that has added pressure they might not get on a normal weekend game.' Round four's other matches see Nelson College and Marlborough Boys' College face off this afternoon, with St Andrew's playing Selwyn Schools tomorrow night. St Bede's hosts St Thomas on Saturday and Rangiora High visits Shirley Boys' on Monday. Miles Toyota Premiership points Marlborough BC 15; CBHS 15; Nelson 11; St Thomas 11; St Bede's 11; Christ's 9; Selwyn 9; Rangiora 2; St Andrew's 1; Shirley BHS 1 School v College past matches 2024 SF: CBHS 24 Christ's 15 2024: CBHS 34 Christ's 25 2023: CBHS 37 Christ's 3 2022: CBHS 47 Christ's 33 2021: Christ's 35 CBHS 34
Otago Daily Times
28-05-2025
- Sport
- Otago Daily Times
Late try seals historic win for Selwyn
Selwyn Schools first-five Ryder Allin forces his way over the line for the winning try. PHOTO: ROO HARRIS PHOTOGRAPHY Selwyn Schools are riding high in the Miles Toyota Premiership after a historic 35-33 win over Christ's College on Saturday – their first ever victory over the celebrated rugby school since Selwyn's combined team was formed in 2017. The win came down to the wire, with first-five Ryder Allin scoring a try in the final minute and then calmly converting it from in front to seal the two-point victory. Selwyn now sit seventh on the ladder, just two points outside the top four. 'It was awesome, I'm really stoked for the boys,' said head coach Sid Tauamiti. 'They certainly enjoyed it, and deserved it.' Despite the result, Tauamiti said there was still work to do. 'We had less 50% of our own lineout ball, we turned the ball over about 17 times. We didn't do ourselves a lot of favours in areas where we needed to be accurate. 'But we still found a way to stay with Christ's College on the scoreboard and then, obviously, at times get ahead of them. We did that when it counted.' Allin proved to be a handful for the Christ's College defence. PHOTO: ROO HARRIS PHOTOGRAPHY Selwyn next face St Andrew's College at Ngā Puna Wai on Friday night. A win would temporarily move them into the top four, although that could change with other matches scheduled for Saturday and Tuesday. St Andrew's are winless in ninth place, but Tauamiti rubbished any idea of his side being favourites for the clash. 'I don't think Selwyn Schools would be considered favourites for many of our games to be fair,' he said. 'They (St Andrew's) may not have had the results, but they put up a fairly good show against (Christchurch) Boys' High, who are one of the frontrunners for the competition. 'They look really well organised, so we'll have to step up again.' Miles Toyota Premiership round 4 (6.30pm Fri) St Andrew's College v Selwyn Schools, Ngā Puna Wai Points Marlborough BC 15; CBHS 15; Nelson College 11; St Thomas 11; St Bede's 11; Christ's College 9; Selwyn 9; Rangiora 2; St Andrew's 1; Shirley BHS 1
Otago Daily Times
23-05-2025
- Sport
- Otago Daily Times
Schools pitch plan for breakaway first XV comp
Bishop Neal streaks away to score for St Thomas of Canterbury College. PHOTO: BRENDAN BIGGS The schoolboy rugby scene in Canterbury could be in for a major shake-up. Boys' schools across the South Island are proposing a new first XV competition that would bring together teams from the Crusaders' Miles Toyota Premiership and the Highlanders' Southern Schools Rugby Championship. However, under the current proposal, co-educational schools such as St Andrew's College, Rangiora High School and the combined Selwyn Schools team would be excluded. In a statement to The Star, the South Island Boys' School Principals stressed that no final decisions had been made. 'These ideas are still in development, and we are working carefully to ensure they reflect the values, needs, and aspirations of all our school communities.' The principals also said the collaboration will not be limited to sport – they are 'exploring initiatives that include the arts, culture, sport, and professional learning,' and that 'a structured first XV rugby competition is one of several proposals under consideration'. Current boys' schools in the top grade include Christchurch Boys' High School, Christ's College, St Thomas of Canterbury College, St Bede's College, and Shirley Boys' High School. They're joined by Nelson College and Marlborough Boys' College from Tasman, and Southland Boys', King's High, Otago Boys', and John McGlashan College further south. Dunstan High School is the only co-ed school currently competing in the top tier. In recent results, Selwyn Schools upset St Bede's 18-12 at Rolleston College, while promoted Rangiora High nearly toppled Christ's College in a narrow 38-37 loss. Christchurch Boys' beat St Andrew's 33-17, Shirley Boys' lost 47-8 to Marlborough, and St Thomas fell 41-26 to Nelson. This weekend, Christchurch Boys' and Nelson meet in a rematch of last year's final, won by Nelson, while St Andrew's take on table-toppers Marlborough. Selwyn hosts Christ's College at Lincoln High School while Shirley Boys' play St Thomas' and St Bede's are away to Rangiora. Miles Toyota Premiership points Marlborough 10; Nelson 10; Chch BHS 10; Christ's 7; St Bede's 6; St Thomas 6; Selwyn 4; Rangiora 2; St Andrew's 1; Shirley BHS 0
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
How the Passionate Male Friendship Died
One of my favorite monuments looks like it belongs to a married couple. Draped in marble flowers and guarded by fat cherubs, it features two stone portraits joined by a knotted cloth, and script that describes an intimate bond: a 'beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls and a companionship undivided during thirty-six complete years.' But this memorial has nothing to do with a husband and a wife. It commemorates a friendship—one between two men, Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines, Renaissance-era doctors who traveled, worked, and lived together in the 1600s and were buried side by side at Christ's College in Cambridge. 'They who while living had mingled their interests, fortunes, counsels, nay rather souls,' reads their tombstone, 'might in the same manner, in death, at last mingle their sacred ashes.' This exuberant expression of love is a far cry from popular depictions of male friendship today, which tend to portray men as struggling with vulnerability, or reticent to form bonds unless prompted by the women in their lives. Of course, Finch and Baines could have been a couple; they lived in a culture that criminalized homosexuality, in which 'friendship' might have served as a guise. But a platonic relationship as effusive as theirs also wouldn't have been out of the ordinary: In their time, across Europe, passionate bonds between men were publicly celebrated, and women were typically viewed as lacking the emotional depth required for true friendship. Many historians have a ritual they use to shake themselves out of their complacent 21st-century perspectives. When my friend Jo sits down at her desk to write about 19th-century America, she tries to remember that back then, pigs used to wander the streets of New York. While writing my latest book, on the history of friendship, going to Finch and Baines's monument was my trick. In an age when women's friendships are widely idealized—think Sex and the City's foursome and pink glitter T-shirts that read Best Friends Forever—Finch and Baines's memorial helped remind me that the cult of female friendship hasn't always been the norm, and that the way friendship is viewed now may not be how it's viewed forever. [Read: The agony of texting with men] I'm a historian of emotion: I study how cultural narratives act on people as individuals—and how changing social factors play out in our hearts and homes. Scholars in my field often talk about the concept of 'emotional communities' to understand how the behavior connected to a particular feeling can change across time and place. An emotional community shares expectations about which emotions should be felt—which are shown, which are hidden, how each should be expressed. Such rules are enforced through institutions such as schools and courts, and via literature, art, and the rituals of family life. As a society's emotional rules change, so do the ways individuals expect to feel—including in friendship. Psychologists have shown that, far from following a universal template, friendship has 'styles' that differ subtly from place to place. According to the psychologist Roger Baumgarte, some cultures, such as that of the United States, seem to favor a more 'independent' style of friendship, in which friends are highly respectful of one another's autonomy and might become uncomfortable if they sense that someone is overstepping a boundary. In other cultures, such as those of Cuba or China, friends are expected to 'intervene' more in a friend's life and might feel snubbed if help is not given. Although this kind of research can quickly give way to reductive stereotypes, it does illuminate how diverse people's expectations about friendship can be. These expectations can also change across time. Finch and Baines's 17th-century emotional community, for instance, was shaped by highly romantic ideas about male friendship. The two men lived toward the end of a period of astonishing intellectual transformation in Europe, when artists, politicians, scientists, and philosophers had rediscovered, via the scholars of the Islamic Golden Age, great works of classical antiquity and wanted to make their ideals their own. One such work, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, written in the fourth century B.C.E., divided friendship into three tiers. The bottom two tiers were populated by ordinary kinds of friends, in what he called friendships of utility and friendships of pleasure (the only kinds that women were supposedly capable of). Friendships of utility, Aristotle wrote, were 'commercially minded,' based on mutual help and quid pro quo. Friendships of pleasure were bonds formed through diversion and entertainment: You might gravitate toward a friend because they make you laugh, or you might sit with them at a game because they support your favorite athlete. But the third tier, which Aristotle called 'perfect' friendship, was something else—a bond between two men 'alike in virtue,' who saw each other as a 'second self.' It was, as later philosophers explained, as if 'one soul dwelled in two bodies.' This is how Baines and Finch saw themselves. They strove to be 'perfect' friends, and by all accounts, they seem to have succeeded. [Read: Why friendship is like art] Another Renaissance figure who believed himself to be a 'perfect' friend was the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, whose essay 'On Friendship' continues to influence writing on the subject today. In his bond with Étienne de La Boétie, a fellow lawyer and author, de Montaigne believed that he had found the kind of ideal friendship that only a few men in a generation could possibly hope to achieve—and his essay is a soaring depiction of their transcendent connection. In one of the most quoted lines in the history of friendship, he writes: 'If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: 'Because it was him: because it was me.'' Like other intellectuals of the time, de Montaigne did not consider women capable of this ideal. Women's brains could not endure this 'clasp of a knot so lasting, and so tightly drawn,' he wrote. His claim was based on the era's misogynistic medical theories, which held that women's brains were colder and weaker than men's. Women were willows, explained the scientist and poet Margaret Cavendish in 1655, liable to bend in the smallest draft—not sturdy oaks. In this way, most women were declared too flighty, capricious, and stupid for the commitment that true friendship required. They were also thought to be too easily distracted by romantic relationships with men. 'The reason why most women are so little affected by friendship,' wrote the 17th-century French nobleman François de La Rochefoucauld, 'is that it tastes insipid when they have felt love.' Women's friendships from this era were not generally memorialized in stone or glorified in reams of soaring poetry. In the archives, their stories appear as fragments compared with the large, easily accessible corpus on male friendship. But certainly they existed. In my research, I found evidence of women's bonds in scraps and shards—glimpses of women grieving over their deceased friends or helping one another through illnesses, evidence of friends forming households and raising children together, running joint businesses, defending others in court. Men knew the power of these alliances. Friendships gave women agency in a world not designed for them. It is perhaps no wonder that their friendships tended to be dismissed. [Read: What thirty years of female friendship looks like] Within 100 years of Finch and Baines's burial, the rules of their emotional community began to shift. The second part of the 18th century was a period of revolutionary fever and social reform across Europe and America. As abolitionist, women's-rights, and anti-poverty campaigns gathered momentum, so did discussions about emotion and sympathy (the old word for empathy). Poets, artists, and philosophers in this new Age of Sensibility began to speak in reverent tones of the supposed heightened sensitivity of 'the female mind.' They helped advance the idea that women enjoyed some special skill in friendship—and were capable of deeply emotional connections with the poor, the disenfranchised, and one another. By the 19th century, though, this belief in women's empathy had hardened into a new ideal of middle-class Victorian femininity: the 'angel of the house.' The consummate woman was supposed to be tender, loving, and eternally supportive; devoted friendships were seen as proof of her compassionate nature. Girlhood bonds were considered practice for the affection and sacrifice necessary for future roles as wives and mothers. Often, girls were primed with stories of highly romantic female friendships: One popular collection of nursery tales depicts two friends, Beatrice and Alice, who 'loved each other dearly' and 'with their arms about each other would sit under the deep shadow of the trees listening for the cuckoo's notes.' In Victorian novels, the girls who enjoy intimate childhood bonds—think Jane Eyre and Helen Burns—grow up to win the prize of marriage and motherhood, and 'difficult,' solitary, awkward girls, such as Lucy Snowe in Villette, marry unhappily, if at all. Romantic friendships between men didn't fall completely out of favor during this time. Photographs from the 1850s to the early 1900s show male friends holding hands or draping their arms around each other; sentimental letters between men in this period also abound. But by the second half of the 19th century, a new narrative about men's friendships was on the rise. Some began to depict male friendships as blundering and superficial. And as gay culture became more visible, and European sexologists stoked fears of 'sexual inversion,' a growing self-consciousness around male intimacy emerged. In 1863, the English feminist campaigner Frances Power Cobbe published an essay, 'Celibacy v. Marriage,' in the widely read Fraser's Magazine, in which she reiterated what had by then become a familiar story about male and female friendships. Whereas women friends enjoyed 'one of the purest of pleasures and the most unselfish of all affections,' Cobbe wrote, to men, friendship was little more than forming an 'acquaintance at a club.' Americans still, to an extent, live among the ghosts of these Victorian forebears, holding women to high standards of intimacy and portraying male bonds as clumsy and inept. We also live in an age of social fragmentation, in which experts, worried about loneliness and isolation, are puzzling over how to bring people together. To foster more connections, we'll need to reexamine our emotional rules—which ones are worth preserving and which ones we might be better off without. As a historian, I can tell you this: If we want to reimagine the terms of friendship, we can. *Lead image credit sources: Fitzwilliam Museum / Bridgeman Images; Harris Brisbane Dick Fund / The Met; Royal Institute of British Architects / The Met Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
19-05-2025
- General
- Atlantic
When Men Weren't Afraid to Love Their Friends
One of my favorite monuments looks like it belongs to a married couple. Draped in marble flowers and guarded by fat cherubs, it features two stone portraits joined by a knotted cloth, and script that describes an intimate bond: a 'beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls and a companionship undivided during thirty-six complete years.' But this memorial has nothing to do with a husband and a wife. It commemorates a friendship—one between two men, Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines, Renaissance-era doctors who traveled, worked, and lived together in the 1600s and were buried side by side at Christ's College in Cambridge. 'They who while living had mingled their interests, fortunes, counsels, nay rather souls,' reads their tombstone, 'might in the same manner, in death, at last mingle their sacred ashes.' This exuberant expression of love is a far cry from popular depictions of male friendship today, which tend to portray men as struggling with vulnerability, or reticent to form bonds unless prompted by the women in their lives. Of course, Finch and Baines could have been a couple; they lived in a culture that criminalized homosexuality, in which 'friendship' might have served as a guise. But a platonic relationship as effusive as theirs also wouldn't have been out of the ordinary: In their time, across Europe, passionate bonds between men were publicly celebrated, and women were typically viewed as lacking the emotional depth required for true friendship. Many historians have a ritual they use to shake themselves out of their complacent 21st-century perspectives. When my friend Jo sits down at her desk to write about 19th-century America, she tries to remember that back then, pigs used to wander the streets of New York. While writing my latest book, on the history of friendship, going to Finch and Baines's monument was my trick. In an age when women's friendships are widely idealized—think Sex and the City 's foursome and pink glitter T-shirts that read Best Friends Forever—Finch and Baines's memorial helped remind me that the cult of female friendship hasn't always been the norm, and that the way friendship is viewed now may not be how it's viewed forever. I'm a historian of emotion: I study how cultural narratives act on people as individuals—and how changing social factors play out in our hearts and homes. Scholars in my field often talk about the concept of 'emotional communities' to understand how the behavior connected to a particular feeling can change across time and place. An emotional community shares expectations about which emotions should be felt—which are shown, which are hidden, how each should be expressed. Such rules are enforced through institutions such as schools and courts, and via literature, art, and the rituals of family life. As a society's emotional rules change, so do the ways individuals expect to feel—including in friendship. Psychologists have shown that, far from following a universal template, friendship has 'styles' that differ subtly from place to place. According to the psychologist Roger Baumgarte, some cultures, such as that of the United States, seem to favor a more 'independent' style of friendship, in which friends are highly respectful of one another's autonomy and might become uncomfortable if they sense that someone is overstepping a boundary. In other cultures, such as those of Cuba or China, friends are expected to 'intervene' more in a friend's life and might feel snubbed if help is not given. Although this kind of research can quickly give way to reductive stereotypes, it does illuminate how diverse people's expectations about friendship can be. These expectations can also change across time. Finch and Baines's 17th-century emotional community, for instance, was shaped by highly romantic ideas about male friendship. The two men lived toward the end of a period of astonishing intellectual transformation in Europe, when artists, politicians, scientists, and philosophers had rediscovered, via the scholars of the Islamic Golden Age, great works of classical antiquity and wanted to make their ideals their own. One such work, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, written in the fourth century B.C.E., divided friendship into three tiers. The bottom two tiers were populated by ordinary kinds of friends, in what he called friendships of utility and friendships of pleasure (the only kinds that women were supposedly capable of). Friendships of utility, Aristotle wrote, were 'commercially minded,' based on mutual help and quid pro quo. Friendships of pleasure were bonds formed through diversion and entertainment: You might gravitate toward a friend because they make you laugh, or you might sit with them at a game because they support your favorite athlete. But the third tier, which Aristotle called 'perfect' friendship, was something else—a bond between two men 'alike in virtue,' who saw each other as a 'second self.' It was, as later philosophers explained, as if 'one soul dwelled in two bodies.' This is how Baines and Finch saw themselves. They strove to be 'perfect' friends, and by all accounts, they seem to have succeeded. Another Renaissance figure who believed himself to be a 'perfect' friend was the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, whose essay 'On Friendship' continues to influence writing on the subject today. In his bond with Étienne de La Boétie, a fellow lawyer and author, de Montaigne believed that he had found the kind of ideal friendship that only a few men in a generation could possibly hope to achieve—and his essay is a soaring depiction of their transcendent connection. In one of the most quoted lines in the history of friendship, he writes: 'If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: 'Because it was him: because it was me.'' Like other intellectuals of the time, de Montaigne did not consider women capable of this ideal. Women's brains could not endure this 'clasp of a knot so lasting, and so tightly drawn,' he wrote. His claim was based on the era's misogynistic medical theories, which held that women's brains were colder and weaker than men's. Women were willows, explained the scientist and poet Margaret Cavendish in 1655, liable to bend in the smallest draft—not sturdy oaks. In this way, most women were declared too flighty, capricious, and stupid for the commitment that true friendship required. They were also thought to be too easily distracted by romantic relationships with men. 'The reason why most women are so little affected by friendship,' wrote the 17th-century French nobleman François de La Rochefoucauld, 'is that it tastes insipid when they have felt love.' Women's friendships from this era were not generally memorialized in stone or glorified in reams of soaring poetry. In the archives, their stories appear as fragments compared with the large, easily accessible corpus on male friendship. But certainly they existed. In my research, I found evidence of women's bonds in scraps and shards—glimpses of women grieving over their deceased friends or helping one another through illnesses, evidence of friends forming households and raising children together, running joint businesses, defending others in court. Men knew the power of these alliances. Friendships gave women agency in a world not designed for them. It is perhaps no wonder that their friendships tended to be dismissed. Within 100 years of Finch and Baines's burial, the rules of their emotional community began to shift. The second part of the 18th century was a period of revolutionary fever and social reform across Europe and America. As abolitionist, women's-rights, and anti-poverty campaigns gathered momentum, so did discussions about emotion and sympathy (the old word for empathy). Poets, artists, and philosophers in this new Age of Sensibility began to speak in reverent tones of the supposed heightened sensitivity of 'the female mind.' They helped advance the idea that women enjoyed some special skill in friendship—and were capable of deeply emotional connections with the poor, the disenfranchised, and one another. By the 19th century, though, this belief in women's empathy had hardened into a new ideal of middle-class Victorian femininity: the 'angel of the house.' The consummate woman was supposed to be tender, loving, and eternally supportive; devoted friendships were seen as proof of her compassionate nature. Girlhood bonds were considered practice for the affection and sacrifice necessary for future roles as wives and mothers. Often, girls were primed with stories of highly romantic female friendships: One popular collection of nursery tales depicts two friends, Beatrice and Alice, who 'loved each other dearly' and 'with their arms about each other would sit under the deep shadow of the trees listening for the cuckoo's notes.' In Victorian novels, the girls who enjoy intimate childhood bonds—think Jane Eyre and Helen Burns—grow up to win the prize of marriage and motherhood, and 'difficult,' solitary, awkward girls, such as Lucy Snowe in Villette, marry unhappily, if at all. Romantic friendships between men didn't fall completely out of favor during this time. Photographs from the 1850s to the early 1900s show male friends holding hands or draping their arms around each other; sentimental letters between men in this period also abound. But by the second half of the 19th century, a new narrative about men's friendships was on the rise. Some began to depict male friendships as blundering and superficial. And as gay culture became more visible, and European sexologists stoked fears of 'sexual inversion,' a growing self-consciousness around male intimacy emerged. In 1863, the English feminist campaigner Frances Power Cobbe published an essay, 'Celibacy v. Marriage,' in the widely read Fraser's Magazine, in which she reiterated what had by then become a familiar story about male and female friendships. Whereas women friends enjoyed 'one of the purest of pleasures and the most unselfish of all affections,' Cobbe wrote, to men, friendship was little more than forming an 'acquaintance at a club.' Americans still, to an extent, live among the ghosts of these Victorian forebears, holding women to high standards of intimacy and portraying male bonds as clumsy and inept. We also live in an age of social fragmentation, in which experts, worried about loneliness and isolation, are puzzling over how to bring people together. To foster more connections, we'll need to reexamine our emotional rules—which ones are worth preserving and which ones we might be better off without. As a historian, I can tell you this: If we want to reimagine the terms of friendship, we can.
