Team USA figure skater Adam Rippon seems to have brought some extra baggage to his Olympic debut in South Korea — a feud with Vice President Mike Pence.

As Pence arrived in Pyeongchang Thursday (Feb. 8), news outlets as varied as USA Today and Vogue reported Rippon, who had criticized Pence for his support of gay conversion therapy, turned down an offer to meet with the vice president in South Korea.

The vice president, who is leading the U.S. delegation to the Winter Olympics, denied such an offer was made and tweeted that it was “fake news.” But several news outlets say they confirmed the offer with the vice president’s office.

The team event in figure skating began on Thursday (Feb. 8).

At 28, the Los Angeles-based Rippon is the oldest American skater to make the Olympic team in 80 years. He is also the first openly gay athlete to represent the U.S. at the Winter Olympics, joined there by Gus Kenworthy, an openly gay snowboarder, who qualified a few days after Rippon.

After Rippon qualified for Team USA, a reporter asked what he thought of the appointment of Pence as the head of the U.S. delegation to the Winter Games.

“You mean Mike Pence, the same Mike Pence that funded gay conversion therapy?” Rippon said. “I’m not buying it.”

Rippon was referring to Pence’s 2000 campaign for U.S. Senate when he supported funding “institutions which…

The 2018 Winter Olympic Games officially opened on Friday in PyeongChang, South Korea. In attendance were several world leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and US Vice President Mike Pence. But the most surprising world leader in attendance was undoubtedly North Korea’s Kim Yo-jong, the sister of the country’s brutal dictator, Kim Jong-un.

What was perhaps just as surprising as Kim Yo-jong’s attendance at the opening ceremony was the way several US news outlets’ covered her presence there.

CNN seemed to give a glowing review of Kim Yo-jong:

“If ‘diplomatic dance’ were an event at the Winter Olympics, Kim Jong Un’s younger sister would be favored to win gold. With a smile, a handshake and a warm message in South Korea’s presidential guest book, Kim Yo Jong has struck a chord with the public just one day into the PyeongChang Games.”

The New York Times even went so far as to say that Kim Yo-jong was a better force of diplomacy than Mike Pence:

“Flashing a sphinx-like smile and without ever speaking in public, Ms. Kim managed to outflank Mr. Trump’s envoy to the Olympics, Vice President Mike Pence, in the game of diplomatic image-making.”

The backlash against these glowing representations of Kim Yo-jong were swift. Other news organizations and private citizens voiced their concerns…

New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman became a superstar on the heels of his popular trade books debunking long-held assumptions about Christian Scriptures.

With titles like “How Jesus Became God,” “Forged” and “Misquoting Jesus,” he gained a devoted following of fellow agnostics, atheists and ex-Christians.

They may not appreciate the title of his newest book, “The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World,” which is set to be released Tuesday (Feb. 13). In it, Ehrman tries to explain a long-puzzling historical drama: How did 20 or so Jesus followers come to convert much of the world in the space of 300 years? (Sociologist Rodney Stark published a book of the same title in 2011.)

Most of the research into the first few centuries after Jesus’ crucifixion around the year 33, he concedes, is not new. Scholars have been grappling with how Christianity exploded on the scene for a long time. Ehrman’s goal is to bring that issue to the masses in plain English, marshaling the evidence — most of it written in Greek and Latin — and crunching the numbers.

True to form, Ehrman, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, doesn’t exalt in Christianity’s success, despite his new book’s title. “In this book I have tried to explain the triumph of Christianity without making it a triumphalist narrative,”…