Opening Salvo on The Emergent Church Movement

Query: 

I know that they generally don't believe in the inerrancy of or literal interpretation of scripture, but I am wondering about the soundness of their scholarship and interpretations. 

It's a little too broad a term to generalize much.

And then too 500 years of Protestantism and 1500 years of Roman Catholicism and 2000 years of Church history haven't been able to entirely agree on what "good hermeneutics" are, so it's kind of tricky judging whether somebody else is interpreting badly.

Having disclaimed with all that, I think that it's less a scholarly movement than a pastoral one. There's little "scholarship" in defense of the emergent movement, which is much more a sort of response to exhaustion with the forms, habits, and failures of Protestantism (and usually an objection to Roman authoritarianism).

More generally, emergentism reflects exhaustion with modernist, absolute modes of thinking that apply only very uneasily to scripture.  So your question's reference to "inerrancy" and "literal interpretation" are sort of important here: it's not exactly that they "don't believe" in such things as they seek to articulate scripture without reference to those rather rigid categories.

The term "Emergent" is not terribly helpful... very few people would answer "Here!" if you shouted, "Any emergents in the audience tonight?"

But in general they draw on ideas of Brian McLaren, the guru of emergentism.  You can find emergent-friendly stuff in the work of Rob Bell and Peter Rollins also.