What is truth and whose is it?

This is well worth reading:

"The pope's third point — which has been almost entirely ignored — was directed to the West. If the West's high culture keeps playing in the sandbox of postmodern irrationalism — in which there is "your truth" and "my truth" but nothing such as "the truth" — the West will be unable to defend itself. Why? Because the West won't be able to give reasons why its commitments to civility, tolerance, human rights and the rule of law are worth defending.

A Western world stripped of convictions about the truths that make Western civilization possible cannot make a useful contribution to a genuine dialogue of civilizations, for any such dialogue must be based on a shared understanding that human beings can, however imperfectly, come to know the truth of things."

On the same theme, read this from Kobayashi Maru, here's a taste:

The impulse of the O'Donnells and the Chomskys of the world is a fundamentally deconstructionist one (something Chomsky surely appreciates; I don't give O'Donnell that much credit.). It's an impulse to cut loose from the idea of a knowable, eternal truth--the font of all reason and love--and seek to elevate anything but. Universal demands for mutual tolerance are thrown aside in favor of demands for one-way tolerance of their type of people and deep hate of Christians and Republicans (for example). Demands for non-violence are little different from the demands heard (or rather, felt) at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968: die pigs!