Politics and Global Citizenship Program 2016-2017
The objective of the new Politics and Global Citizenship Program, inherited from our Political Leadership Program, is to offer participants the opportunity to explore in-depth complex questions related to public policy, with leaders from a diverse range of sectors and with internationally-recognized experts. Over the course of a year, program participants will have the opportunity to explore proposed themes in a non-partisan environment in which they can form personal relationships that will transcend political affiliations and are crucial for the pursuit of intelligent and innovative solutions to our country´s most pressing problems.
The fourth session of the new program took place Wednesday, March 8, and featured Todd Breyfogle, Director of Seminars for the Aspen Institute US, as the keynote speaker. Participants debated the topic, “Culture, Institutions, and Democracy”.
This initiative is coordinated by Juan Moscoso del Prado and co-directed by Juan and also Guillermo Mariscal (Grupo Popular). The program is structured across 5-6 seminar sessions throughout the year, in the form of open discussions and with the objective of discussing topics relevant to the themes of politics and public services, such as geopolitics, leadership, energy, and the international economy. The program concludes in July with a day and a half long session, in which participants participate in a version of the Aspen Seminar, a round-table discussion of values-based leadership and the hallmark seminar of the Aspen Institute world-wide.
Given the current global state-of-affairs, at Aspen Institute España we see this new program as a priority, to create an initiative that could serve as a space for debate among those dedicated to public service, who have demonstrated leadership capacity in their field.
Todd Breyfogle is the Director of Seminars at the Aspen Institute, with responsibilities for open-enrollment leadership and executive programs include the classic Aspen Executive Seminar on Leadership, Values, and the Good Society. He also oversees key academic seminars for university faculty, administrators, presidents, and trustees, and many of the Institute’s international and customized leadership programs. Todd is a senior moderator and assists with moderator development and curriculum design. Before joining the Aspen Institute full-time in 2008, Todd was an Institute moderator and academic. From 2000-2007, he directed the University Honors Program at the University of Denver, where he also taught interdisciplinary seminars in the arts and humanities and has also taught graduate courses in theology as an adjunct professor at the Iliff School of Theology. He was a visiting professor in the department of philosophy and religion at the University of Tulsa in 2007-2008. From 1995 to 2000, Todd was a Fellow and Program Officer at Liberty Fund, where he gained extensive experience organizing and facilitating great book discussions. Todd serves on several non-profit boards. He chairs the American Academy for Liberal Education, is a senator of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and for fourteen years edited The American Oxonian, the quarterly publication of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars. A Colorado native, Todd did his B.A. in Classics-History-Politics at Colorado College. He then attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, studying Ancient and Modern History (B.A.) and Patristic and Modern Theology (M.St.). He earned his Ph.D. as a Century Fellow and Javits Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on St. Augustine’s political theology. He is the editor of Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern: Essays in Honor of David Grene (University of Chicago Press, 1999), and has authored a number of scholarly and popular articles ranging from Augustine to J. S. Bach to contemporary political theory. He has lectured at universities in the UK, U.S., Canada, and India, including Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Dartmouth, Wesleyan, Concordia, and the University of Chicago.