I have never known a more eagle-eyed copyeditor than Carol Thiessen, who passed away just as our last issue was going to press. Her attention to the details of spelling, grammar, and style was legendary, and very few mistakes made it into print during her nearly 21-year tenure here. With so little to tease her about, we had to keep returning to the same old mistake—the time the word Christianity was spelled Christiantity on our cover.

Carol was a grammatical and syntactical traditionalist, but she was never without her reasons. Her knowledge of style manuals and specialized dictionaries was prodigious, and in 1983 she created CT's first house style manual. She fought to preserve the distinctions between alternate and alternative and between expect and anticipate. And as CT's czarina of style, she exercised royal prerogative: She even arranged to have CT's managing editor locked out of all the electronic files she had finished polishing. It was dangerous to fiddle with Carol's files.

Carol was firm but not fierce, steadfast but not stodgy. Her church was the love of her life (she served as an elder, music leader, and worship planner). And she was known for her kindness to cats (evidence of which not infrequently showed up on her clothes). Carol had a wonderful sense of humor, too, though it sometimes took people a while to catch on. When I came to work here, she was driving a blue Plymouth Horizon she affectionately called "Beyond." (Hint: the category is popular songs from the 1940s.)

Music, in particular, and the arts, in general, were close to Carol's heartbeat. She fought for arts coverage in our scarce editorial space and networked with Christian artists whose artistic passions were fueled by their faith.

Carol was also ...