Theme Horse

Hi Jason,

For your first issue:
Go to dashboard-> settings-> reading and select static home page and on the post page leave it as blank. View this below screenshot.
http://awesomescreenshot.com/0e94mpvu2d

So that your slider will not be displayed in the blog page and will only display in home page.

For your second issue:
Yes we have made the slider content off to display in mobile display. Because too many text will voilate the design. We have designed our theme this way. If you want to display text in your tablet then please add this below custom css

@media only screen and (max-width: 767px) {
    .featured-text {
       display: block;
    }
}

Thank you!