Clayton Emmer, the creator of this website, lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A native of Minneapolis, he graduated from Franciscan University of Steubenville in 1993 with a BA in English Literature and Great Books, attended a month-long graduate-level program at the Shakespeare Institute in 1993, and spent two years in formation for diocesan priesthood at the Saint Paul Seminary. He has worked in the world of training and website development since 1997.
In 2001, he created doxaweb.com. He was also a freelance writer for The Catholic Servant from 1998 until 2002, and attended the Act One: Writing for Hollywood program in Chicago in 2002.
From 2003 until 2009, Clayton lived in Los Angeles, California, where he worked as a production assistant at Family Theater Productions in Hollywood and then for a Fortune 500 as a web content administrator. His volunteer activities during those years included leading a Theology of the Body study group, serving as a juror for the Angelus Awards Student Film Festival, and acting as coordinator and catechist for the RCIA Hollywood program. More details about the Hollywood years may be found here.
The word doxa is Latin for praise, glory, honor. This website takes its inspiration from the idea of glory described by C.S. Lewis in the essay The Weight of Glory. At the heart of the essay, Lewis writes:
It may be possible for each [person] to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would strongly be tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another…. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal…. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.