separating categories on different pages

This is probably a fairly common question, but I haven’t been able to find a decent answer so I’m asking myself.

Basically I’m trying to separate my categories. I have five categories (News, Events, Personal Life, Books, Church)

What I want is to have the News and Events categories on their own page.

So this is two things.
1) I want them to not show up on the main blog page
2) I want a separate page with just those two categories.

I found this (and this) but as far as I can tell that technique is for a singular post and would require going thru the same manual steps for each post?

I’m really new to WP so forgive me if I’m misunderstanding how it works but I was thinking for #1 I could somehow in ‘the loop’ check each post to see if the category is “News” or “Events” and then not display them?

and for #2 I could create a new theme identical in look to my current them but with the loop only showing “News” and “Events” and then set the N&E page to this new them.