The .CSS code addition didn’t work. I made sure to purge the caches and hit ctrl-f5 a few times to get a fresh page load after the .css code was saved. I’m sure it’s something residual from the previously installed theme, but for those of us with a dark themed website, it’s pretty maddening when you can’t track it down using theme editor.
I went back into the settings and found where there are different types of slider settings. The first slider setting puts grey colored padding around the events, which doesn’t blend well with our dark theme. Our solution was even more elegant, we just picked a different type of slider and found one that posted the featured event photo of each event as fit to column. It’s looking pretty slick right now. Thank you so much for your fast response.