I don't know if you've ever visited an Emergent Village. I never have. I suspect the Emergent Village is a lot like Chelm but with swine. Someday I want to go to an Emergent Village, and when I do I want to do a couple of things. First I want to conduct some tests on the drinking water.

Then I think I will want to hit the concert hall/wrestling arena/fairgrounds/saloon and take in a "show". Nothing says more about a person than what sort of entertainment he pays for. I'm going to go way out on a limb here and suppose they don't have many string quartets, so this experienced traveler won't be packing his Lea Pocket Scores.

Sometime I'd like to go by their market and see how they sell their foodstuffs. I am prepared to be somewhat nauseated by that experience, but I've eaten in Louisiana, so I think I can handle it.

It wouldn't make much sense for there to be a library in the Emergent Village.

Eventually I want to make it to their ball park.

Tony Jones is the National Coordinator here on emergentvillage.org, and he claims to have been an umpire. He told a bunch of people over at Wheaton College what a strike was [Whence Hermeneutic Authority? available here], and while I haven't collected all the details, I gather there weren't a lot of people cheering him around third. And that comes as a bit of a surprise to me because I thought they could believe anything over at Wheaton.

Here are some of Tony's "thoughts". They are really bad thoughts and I'm not surprised Wheaton decided not to publish them. Even Wheaton has some standards. And apparently sometime later he was mocked in class, and Tony doesn't like that.

(Gotta love emergents. Soon maybe fundamentalists can be as serious as emergents.)

Of course, it's not lost on me that since the earliest days of the postmodern conversation, there's been story floating around about three umpires,

• The pre-modern umpire says, "I call 'em as they are!"
• The modern umpire says, "I call 'em as I see 'em!"
• The postmodern umpire says, "They ain't nothin' 'till I call 'em!"

This all stems, it seems, from the irrepressible literary critic, Stanley Fish, who years ago told this story about the legendary umpire, Bill Klem,

"Klem's behind the plate," Fish said. "The pitcher winds up, throws the ball. The pitch comes. The batter doesn't swing. Klem for an instant says nothing. The batter turns around and says, ‘O.K., so what was it, a ball or a strike?' And Klem says, ‘Sonny, it ain't nothing 'till I call it.'

"What the batter is assuming is that balls and strikes are facts in the world and that the umpire's job is to accurately say which one each pitch is. But in fact balls and strikes come into being only on the call of an umpire."

So the ball that goes in the dirt is a strike if the ump calls it a strike. The ball that beans the hotdog vendor is a strike if the ump calls it a strike. The ball still in the pitcher's glove is a strike if the ump calls it a strike. There is no strike zone, really ; there is only the call of the umpire.

Baseball Rulebook, Rule 2.00 at Emergent Stadium.

Now let's do some theology, Tony!