What happens when yoga goes to church? From a word-centered to a body-centered religiosity?

Yoga in church is a relatively new phenomenon. From being a practice associated with “Eastern” religiosity and culture, yoga is today widespread in the Western world and can be found in places such as gyms, schools, and health care. More recently, yoga has also traveled into new religious spaces, such as Christian monasteries and churches. This paper explores this phenomenon by taking departure in a qualitative empirical study of yoga services in the Church of Norway (CoN) and the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Denmark (ELCD). We ask: What happens when yoga goes to church? A particular focus is on how discontinuities are simultaneously re-established and bridged, especially regarding the use of the body. We argue that in these services, a dual boundary process of bodily hybridization on the one hand and wordily purification on the other takes place, displaying how discontinuities are both bridged and re-established.