Reply To: Making the Featured Posts widget play "wide" on Home Page

The reason it’s showing up like that is because the markup is different in the Genesis 2.0 version. You could add this to your css and it would add a white background around the entire post and widget title –

.featuredpost {
    background: #fff;
    padding: 20px 40px;
}

Then you would need to remove the box-shadow from the .entry on line 2197 in your css if you don’t want to use it.