Aaron Schuck

About
Aaron Schuck is a writer, educator, and former collegiate basketball coach whose vocation lives at the crossroads of sport, virtue, faith, and history. Trained in philosophy and theology, he draws deeply from the Christian intellectual tradition—especially Thomas Aquinas and the contemporary pastoral vision of Bishop Robert Barron—to explore how truth takes flesh in ordinary disciplines and extraordinary trials.

For more than fifteen years on the hardwood, Aaron learned to see basketball as a school of the soul: competition ordered toward character, teamwork ordered toward communion, beauty unfolding in motion. That coaching life shaped his first books—The Divine Game: How Basketball’s Beauty, Goodness, and Truth Reflect Life and Faith and The Court of Illusion: Basketball’s Moral Reckoning in an Age of Appearances—works praised for lyrical style, moral clarity, and intellectual depth. In them, he invites readers to confront modern ethical challenges through a lens polished by theology, classical narrative, and athletic discipline.

Aaron’s current work extends that same moral imagination into the furnace of medieval history. Writing under the banner Liturgical. Brutal. True., he crafts literary historical fiction that bears witness to grace under siege—most notably in an expansive project centered on The Siege of Château Gaillard (1203–1204). His fiction is braided, immersive, and theologically resonant: command and conscience, rumor and memory, flesh and faith. It is grounded in meticulous research on medieval logistics, monastic life, and siegecraft, yet written with a sacramental eye that looks for the hidden God in ash, hunger, and fidelity.

Across essays and novels alike, Aaron’s aim is constant: to recover meaning where noise has thinned it, to let form and truth reclaim the imagination, and to show how the virtues—courage, prudence, justice, temperance, charity—are not abstractions but practices that shape lives and nations. His influences range from Shūsaku Endō and Georges Bernanos to Bernard Cornwell and medieval chroniclers; his tone is reverent without sentimentality, unflinching without despair.

When he’s not writing, you might find him cheering the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pirates or Notre Dame Football—or happily lost in a stack of histories and historical fiction. He writes for readers who want more than entertainment: readers who hunger for beauty ordered to truth, and stories scarred by grace.