JS slider function not selecting featured category

Hello, Experts,
I’m using a modification of Akylas theme (based, I think on Tauri), which has a built in js slider (not a plugin, unfortunately). The slider itself works great, but it doesn’t select the content based on category. The code is this:

<!-- BEGIN featured -->
<div id="featured">

	<div class="container">

		<?php
		$tmp_query = $wp_query;
	query_posts('showposts=4&cat=' . get_cat_ID(dp_settings('featured')));
		if (have_posts()) :
		while (have_posts()) : the_post();
		?>

		<div class="item">
			<a class="thumb" href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php dp_attachment_image($post->ID, 'medium', 'alt="' . $post->post_title . '"'); ?></a>
			<p class="date"><?php the_time('F j, Y') ?></p>
			<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
			<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
		</div>

		<?php
		endwhile;
		endif;
		$wp_query = $tmp_query;
		?>

	</div>

	<a href="#" class="previous">Previous</a>
	<a href="#" class="next">Next</a>

</div>
<!-- END featured -->

It seems that if I select the “featured” category for each of the posts I want to feature, they should show up in the slider. However, I only get the most recent X posts (4 in this case).

Short of routinely changing the dates of the posts I want to feature (as, essentially, static content for the sliders), I don’t know how to get the slider to either a) select the category properly, or b) simply insert some code (don’t know what) that would hard code the pages I wanted to feature into the slider.

Does anyone have any advice?

The site, https://www.olympusresumes.com is live but the theme I’m changing to isn’t live yet.

Many thanks,
Amy