Can't get posts to appear on Home Page

I’m loving this theme, but having a few problems with the Home Page.

I want to display a selection of featured posts on the home page, right underneath the introductory text, but the theme only seems to give me the option of putting these right at the top in the Header section, or right down below in the Footer section.

I therefore tried to do this by using the “Content Views” plugin which positions the post excerpts using a shortcode. However I couldn’t get the shortcode to work within the Home Page text – it works on other pages, but not on the Home Page.

Now I find that the Home Page is showing only a short excerpt of the text I want it to show (it was showing the whole text originally) – but when I click on the “read more” link, nothing happens.

Is there any way that I can get featured posts and pages to appear in the middle of the Home Page, instead of having a photo and a tiny bit of text, then a huge white space?

Thanks.