Possible to do recurring payments with Bitcoin? I'm a developer and using the Coinbase Ruby API to attempt to build a Coinbase application.  I'm still coming to grips with how it all works.  My question is, is it possible to set up recurring payments with Bitcoin?  If so, how does that work?  

I would prefer not to lean on a solution where I'm waiting for the customer to submit a payment every month, but for regular one-time payments, it was mentioned to me on this forum that the only way to accept them is to give the customer an address and hope they submit a payment.
No, you cannot do that. In Bitcoin, everything relies on the payer to perform the transaction, not the receiver. You as the receiver cannot do anything to make the payer give you money unlike with fiat payment processors.

However if all of your customers are using a centralized service like Coinbase, you can create software which uses Coinbase's API and essentially gives you permission to move that person's coins. This allows you to make the transactions to pay you but it also requires the user to trust you to not steal their money. There should be a permissioning system that makes this setup more trustworthy and less dangerous for the users.