The difference in visions of personhood is at the heart of what he has called elsewhere "a clash of orthodoxies".
And that is certainly the case in "This Beautiful City," which presents its collage of human experience without commentary, with a loose focus on the clash between religious orthodoxy and freedom of sexual expression.
He also boasts a populist position on trade and clashes with party orthodoxy on foreign policy and campaign finance.
As he did, he felt a growing sense of discomfort with the rebbe's messianic rhetoric, which he thought clashed with traditional Jewish orthodoxy.
In the course of this very substantial and always meticulously sustained argument, Dawkins writes things that one feels he might not choose to write now, on punctuated equilibrium, cladism and other clashes of heresy and orthodoxy, doctrine and ritual within the broad church of evolutionary argument.
He thinks the trouble is not so much a clash of Democratic and Republican orthodoxies as it is a clash of past and future.
Her performance is the deepest and truest element in this shallow feel-good movie about the clash between gay rights and Catholic orthodoxy in a generic suburban town named Chester.
He is likely to face a striking culture clash with the institution, the bastion of foreign policy orthodoxy, which would have an ally in the secretary of defence nominee, the retired general James Mattis, who is likely to oppose any erosion of Nato solidarity in the face of Moscow's assertiveness in Europe.
Figes writes of Russians and Turks clashing over "religious battlegrounds, the fault line between Orthodoxy and Islam," and explains that "every nation, none more so than Russia, went to war in the belief that God was on its side".
The religious orthodoxy he attempted to impose on his already multicultural domain, however, soon led him to clash with the Quaker population of Flushing (1657).
For all the efforts of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama to portray themselves as willing to break with party orthodoxy to get things done, the economic debate that opened their general election campaign this week previews a classic clash.
