Zeal: A Journal for the Liberal Arts
Zeal: A Journal for the Liberal Arts is an online, open-access journal with the mission of inspiring and fostering scholarship that supports and advances the liberal arts. The journal specializes in publishing interdisciplinary forums, author-meets-critics book discussions, and less conventional "Provocations & Occasions"—articles that, though worthy of a wide readership, are in one way or another misfits with standard disciplinary journals.
The journal will appear twice annually; issue 1/1 appeared in fall 2022, and 1/2 in spring 2023.
Zeal invites articles submitted as "Provocations & Occasions." Submissions will undergo double-blind peer review.
By way of example, appropriate articles might have originated as a response to a longer article or a lecture. They also might be written in a style that is considered inappropriate for a disciplinary journal: perhaps the article is funny or uncommonly creative or written with unaccustomed zeal. A third possibility, though not the last, is that the article originated from teaching and speaks to a question that is of limited interest to specialists, but important for a teacher to work through.
Send submissions to zeal@kings.edu. Typical length will be 3,000 words, though shorter and longer are welcome. No abstract is needed. Follow Chicago humanities style, with endnotes and no list of works cited.
Recurring forums include:
"Ethics in Focus"
A forum about texts, theories, and pedagogical practices, regularly crossing philosophy and theology
"The Great Books and Beyond"
A forum dedicated both to exploring classical texts that have shaped the intellectual and moral horizons of the world’s cultures and to expanding the "canon" to include under-represented voices
"Liberal Arts Starts and Circuitous Routes"
A forum on career preparation and viable professional paths for liberal arts students, as well as on career journeys that put liberal arts education to unexpected use
"Overheard in the Academy"
A forum about the "real world" of the Ivory Tower—controversies over curriculum, conditions of employment, and other topics in the politics and economics of higher education
"Powerful Expressions"
A forum about how the arts (literature, theatre, visual art, film, music, dance) engage social questions, give voice to the unheard, and foster understanding
"Reappraisals"
A forum dedicated to reconsideration of settled scholarship, especially, though not only, when it might benefit from the contributions of currently under-represented scholars
"Transformative Teaching"
A forum about the practices, philosophies, and perspectives that shape the liberal arts classrooms
Ethics in Focus (2013-2020)
In collaboration with Villanova University's Center for Liberal Education, the McGowan Center published the forum "Ethics in Focus" once per year, from 2013 through 2020, in the online, open-access, peer-reviewed journal Expositions: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. In 2022, that journal moved to King's and was renamed Zeal: A Journal for the Liberal Arts.
The inaugural "Ethics in Focus" forum, which appeared in Expositions 7/1 (2013), concerns the questions of what should and realistically can be the aims of ethics education at the college level. Similarly, the forum in Expositions 10/1 (2016) discusses obstacles and opportunities for the integration of Catholic social thought (CST) in college curricula. In 2015, Expositions 9/1 considered the aims of Catholic higher education more broadly, with seven articles from the King's conference "The Idea of a Catholic College."
Other iterations have focused on books that have generated much discussion. The 2014 forum, in Expositions 8/2, concerns philosopher Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, in particular its arguments for moral realism. The forum published in 2020, in Expositions 14/1, concerns philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, in particular its implications for the teaching of ethics.
Seeking to contribute to the law, the forum in Expositions 11/1 (2017) concerns the ethics of cooperation with wrongdoing, in particular as it applies to U.S. Supreme Court cases like Hobby Lobby and Zubik v. Burwell. See, for an overview, this online-only article in the magazine Commonweal. Seeking to contribute to the Church, the whole of Expositions 12/1 (2018) was devoted to a forum on the future of just war theory in Catholic social thought. See, for an overview, this post on the blog Catholic Moral Theology.