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.